Much, Much Joy! Slamd64 Installed

After much gnashing of teeth, I finally have Slamd64-10.2b installed on my machine!

Partition Magic (PM) is my friend. But it's not without its issues. I had PM 8.0 on hand, and was having a little trouble with error 702, so I updated it to 8.01, then installed the error 1513 patch.

I used PM to divide my 80G hard drive into six partitions, including four Linux partitions as suggested here. This is how my partitions are set up:

       Size  Type  XP Label  Linux Label
     *  15G  NTFS     C:        hda1/
     *   2G  Ext3     F:        hda3/
     * 500Mb Swap     G:        hda5/
     *   5G  Ext3     H:        hda6/
     *  25G  Ext3     I:        hda7/
     *  25G  FAT32    J:        hda8/

     C: hda1/   contains Windows XP and its programs
     F: hda3/   is for Linux / (boot)
     G: hda5/   is the Linux swap partition
     H: hda6/   is for the Linux /usr branch
     I: hda7/   is for the Linux /home branch
     J: hda8/   contains my music files, documents, etc.

Why do I have Windows XP drive letters for my Linux partitions? After all, normally Windows can't even detect Linux drives. It's thanks to EXT2 IFS, a program recommended to me by a Linux user who was kind enough to help the newbie.

I downloaded the files for the base system (a/) software set for Slamd64-current, saving them to my FAT32 partition. I tried to check the files with md5sum, but since CHECKSUMS.md5 lists *all* the files for Slamd64-current; not just for the base system software set, my command line window spewed error messages about missing files. Okay, over to QuickPar.

Once QuickPar is installed, Windows recognizes .md5 files as belonging to the QuickPar program. With the CHECKSUMS.md5 file in the same directory as the base system software set, I double-clicked CHECKSUMS.md5. Plenty of files were missing (of course; I didn't download them) but it efficiently told me that the ones I did download were good. Using Slax as my boot disk, I fired up Linux.

Using the cp command, I moved all the files for Slamd64-current to hda3, and fired up install-packages, as instructed in the downloaded file of the same name. Croak. It gave me this cryptic message saying it "cannot execute binary file" for installpkg. I tried asking other Linux users what's going wrong. No one had any suggestions, so I asked if I'd be better off installing Slamd64-10.2b, since there were iso's for it. Definitely yes.

I downloaded all the iso's, and set to burn them on my set of CD-RW's. Nero complained about images 1 and 5. Too big for CD-RW's unless I want to finalize it (ensure no more files can be written to the cd). I didn't know if that would make said CD-RW unerasable. I didn't feel like hunting through Google for the answer, and I didn't want to risk it.

I tried to use Nero to burn to DVD-RW. It didn't want to burn an iso to anything besides a CD, and I didn't want to waste CD-R's. Alcohol 120% didn't want to cope with a DVD-RW, either. Fine. I decided to see if DVD Decrypter was willing to do it. Finally, success!

I had two DVD-RW's and three CD-RW's, comprising the Slamd64 5-disc iso set. Stuff them in the drive, reboot... Friendly installer interface. Read the screen and follow the directions. It only wanted discs 1-3, so who knows, yet, what discs 4 and 5 are for. Whatever. One thing I would recommend: When it asks if you'd like to change the font, change it to something noticeably different (but not difficult to read) from the standard font. That way, when using a boot disk you'll know when it flips from using the boot files to running the operating system installed on your computer.

One highly annoying aspect -- this is an OS tailored for some of the hottest processors on the home computer market (AMD 64), but no one has seemed to realize that laptops are often sold without floppy drives, nowadays. They highly recommend creating a boot floppy. Yeah, well, that ain't happening, because I don't have a floppy drive. Grr. Yes, there are plenty of AMD 64 computers with floppies, so the prompt is useful, but it would be nice to have some advice for those of us who don't have the ability to create the highly recommended boot floppies.

I tried in vain to set up LILO so that I could dual boot my system. That's a problem I guess I'll cope with later, once I learn a lot more about Linux. At least I can boot from disc 1 of the Slamd64 installation iso's. At the boot prompt, there are clear instructions on how to boot the installed system.

Next project, accessing the data on the hard drive.

To make sure I knew what each partition was called in Linux, I typed:

     fdisk -l

Which helped me to form my list of partitions.

Next was to mount each of the hard disks, so that I could access them.

     mount /dev/hda3 /mnt/hda3

Didn't quite work. It gave the message "mount: mount point /mnt/hda3 does not exist"

     mkdir /mnt/hda3
     mount /dev/hda3 /mnt/hda3

Did the trick.