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.

Slackware without a Hard Drive

Today's experiment is to create a cd containing Slax, which is a live CD based on Slackware. That way, I can toy with something close to Slackware right away, even though I'm not ready to install Slackware to my hard drive.

I extracted the files in the .iso with almighty WinRAR, then erased the cd and wrote the extracted files and modules. Made sure the computer boots from the DVD drive, reboot, and... No joy. It booted Windows.

Fine, I'll RTFM.

I downloaded md5sum and checked the integrity of my .iso. Effing grr... An hour to download, and the checksum doesn't match. Downloaded again, this time from the ftp site, rather than the html site. Checksum matched, so on to add my modules and burn with Nero.

Reboot, and... Well, it tried. Bios not found?! It hung while attempting to boot. I hope it's not because I'm trying to run it on an AMD64 machine. Damn, I don't want to hook up my Athlon 1100 box.

The Slax forum has posts by people running Slax on AMD64 machines, so I don't think that's it. Which means I have a mystery with few clues.

Okay, I referred to the Slax cheatcodes and tried the boot code acpi=off. It actually loaded. Yay! I managed to play Linux' version of JezzBall! (After all, aren't lame arcade games the most important capability of a computer?) No detection of my wireless card, so that's the next objective.

Cleaning up Windows

Introduction

The first PC I got to know and love was a 286 running MS-DOS 3.1. That was before Windows existed in the personal computer market. The computer in question had no HDD, no mouse, no modem. They were available at the time, but expensive and uncommon for PC's.

I devoured the DOS 3.1 manual and even experienced the evil that was Edlin. On through Windows 3.1, 95, 98, 98se, Me (I'm so ashamed), 2000, and XP, I've seen Windows in all its moods. I've tweaked it, hacked it, and re-installed it more times than I care to recall. However, I regretfully admit that I have never met that intriguing penguin named Tux.

It's time for a change. Being a rather ambitious and masochistic techie, I have decided to move to Slackware Linux. This blog is my journal of the move, and hopefully a guide for those who come after.

Why did I choose Slackware?

I took a look through DistroWatch.com, hunting for information on the various distros of Linux. My first consideration was popularity, because I know I'm going to need all the documentation I can get. The larger the user community, the more documentation. I found the DistroWatch article Top Ten Distributions.

The command prompt has been my friend for over 15 years, so I wanted a distro that didn't rely strongly on a GUI. I also wanted solid stability and security. Slackware especially caught my eye because DistroWatch said it has a "strong adherence to UNIX principles". Which I figure must mean, it's as far from Windows and Mac as you can get. Looks like the choice for me.

I'm sure many people would suggest I cut my teeth on a more user-friendly distro. Well, I love tweaking my OS for hours at a time, and I'm not going to do that if I know I eventually intend to switch to another distro. Besides, as I said before, I'm masochistic.

Cleaning up Windows

The computer I will be using for the Linux install is a laptop with an AMD64 processor (which means I'll be using Slamd64), 512MB RAM, 80Gig HDD. Ideally, one would install a second HDD, so that each OS can play on its own disk. But since my computer is a laptop, I don't have the luxury of adding a second internal HDD. I can't afford an external HDD. So, it's time for some serious backup.

As I go along, writing data to DVDs, I'm also nuking unessential programs and defragging. I hope to make XP as small as possible. The less data I need to shift around my HDD, the better. My hope is to install Slackware on the primary partition, so that I can simply nuke the secondary partition (containing Windows) on that magical day when I don't need Windows any more.

Pieces of software that have made my life easier:

Freeware. 1-4a Rename is a priceless little tool if you're anal about how file names appear. This is especially important for renaming files so that spaces are replaced by underscores (e.g., My File.doc -> My_File.doc). After all, from what I've read, Linux *hates* spaces in file names.

Settings to replace spaces with underscores in 1-4a Rename:
Change to expert mode (F2). In the peach-colored box, the first checkbox is 'Replace". Check this. In the first text field, put one space. (" " without the quotes). In the second text field, put one underscore. ("_" without the quotes). In the drop-down box, choose 1st occurance. Don't check any of the other checkboxes within the peach-colored box.

Freeware. Karen's Directory Printer. With this utility, I can quickly grab a listing of all directories, with their sizes. After dumping the results into Excel and sorting them, I can easily see which directories are munching up the most drive space. These directories are my primary targets.