The Setup Program

Once you have created your partitions, you are ready to install Slackware. The next step in the installation process is running the setup program. To do so, simply type " setup " at the shell prompt. Setup is a menu-driven system for actually installing the Slackware packages and configuring your system. Here is what you will see:

Now before you feel overwhelmed, notice the arrows I threw in pointing at two of the items. These are the ONLY ones you will have to select from the menu. addswap is the first thing you will do, and exit is the last thing you will do when the installation is complete. There are several dialog boxes that pop up, but you will run through them very quickly --

So select [ addswap ] then press [ enter ] for OK. If your drive is partitioned corectly, you will see the next dialog as follows (device names ie. /dev/hda4 may vary):

You simply click [ enter ] for yes. Then the same for the hard drive, which should come up by itself:




By choosing Select you will get the next choice:


-- If you have not checked your drive previously, then let it do a bad-block check. It only takes a bit of extra time. Better safe than sorry. Next you will be asked which type of drive formatting you would like. Reiser is the default, and I have used it for years with pride and pleasure.




Then it asks where you are inastalling from -- and we are installing from CD . . .



And finally, we let it auto detect the CD-ROM drive.

Installing Packages

Here Absolute takes over, because it does not ask WHAT you want to install, it just starts doing it. Because after you choose to auto-detect the install CD-ROM it prompts you to refresh your coffee and starts loading. This takes me 10-11 minutes on a P4 2GHz with an older ide drive.

When the install has finished loading packages it will promt you to start configuration.