First installment: Tempting box with Slackware 13.0 had been sitting on my desk for a week or so. Struggled with the plastic rap for while (success) and put disk 1 in a CD and rebooted. A text screen appeared with the instructions to hit enter which I did. I get a familiar list of choices (have done this seems like 1000 times). Agreed with the choice of swap partition (was already there from older installations). Went to the choice of source, it looked for and found HDC. However it got stuck there so I started again (have two cd's on this machine) Repeated the steps but with HDD which seemed to please the installation program. told it which partition to use (had already prepared it with mkfs -t ext3 /dev/hd3. checked back periodically to change CD's (three of them) Answered no to a bunch of questions (will customize later). so upon reboot got error message #2 (bad file or directory type). Remembered from my slackware 12.2 install that GRUB boot loader needed updating. so first rechecked my syntax for typos then discovered I had a grub install program on the the working 12.1 system. Hadn't run it as was using an older grub. Got stumped for a while as my notes didn't tell me how to reinstall grub. the command grub -help was no help. by chance I typed grub then tab (command completion) and grubconfig appeared - chose that, told it which partition to use (hda2) and to use the MBR. Rebooted and could boot 13.0. Made a change in grub's menu.lst to make the 12.1 install default: timeout 5 default 1 Will edit the grub generated menu to look better later (maybe). Next steps is to introduce 13.0 to my LAN and customize it. Second installment: Another 20 minutes or so, booted 13.0, added useres for my household in the same order as older installation (12.1) as will use the existing /home which is on another partition. (this allows seemless rebooting from either version in case I mess something up - can go back to 12.1) to introduce 13.0 to the world and the LAN ran "netconfig." Told it to use a static IP so the other computers can find it, use the router as a nameserver. Tried to remember how to tell the computer to re read the related files, found in my notes that I should run ifconfig eth1 up which didn't work, changed eth1 to eth2, that didn't work, tried eth0 and that worked. then ran /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 and could connect to the internet. Could have rebooted with the same results. (maybe taking longer to document this than to do it - thanks Doug.) went to the /mnt directory and added all the partitions on this machine, copied over a bunch of entries in fstab, deleted /home and then symlinked the home on another partition to the 13.0 partition. In /etc/inetd.conf uncommented profession ftp and telnet. Copied IPs for the LAN to /etc/hosts. went to /etc/kde/kdm, discovered kdmrc is quite a bit bigger, told it to listen to incomming XDMCP request (Enable=true). guess I should reboot and see what I messed up. Added /usr/bin/kdm to start kdm and ntpdate pool.ntp.org to keep the time correct to /etc/rc.d/rc.local. first error forgot to add the partition where home is to fstab which confused the computer - fixed that. Can't leave it as default boot yet as pandora internet radio wanted an adobe plugin for flash (available at slacky.eu). Glanced at the new kde - seems to work ok with the old /home but for there is too much going on so will stick with blackbox as window manager. me there is too much going on - will stick with blackbox. third installment deactivated samba in pkgtool as I was getting error messages on boot up - have yet to move/reedit smb.conf when I do will reactive samba demond for boot up. Installed adobe flash player so can listen to Pandora radio. Was unhappy that the old "konsole" program from kde has been slimmed down. Copied all my little shell scripts from the old /usr/local/bin to the new one. (I like to call things from the command line or from my custom blackbox menu. don't like a "desktop." Couldn't find "login manager" in kde 4.2.4 so went to /etc/kde/kdm/kdmrc and changed NoPassEnable to true and added household useres. got stumped - need dosemu, tried installing a 12.1 dosemu package, it installed OK but when I ran dosemu got: bash-3.1$ dosemu LOWRAM mmap: Invalid argument Segmentation fault bash-3.1$ can't find a dosemu package for 13.0 - important as I run a whole bunch of stuff with my antique dbase program fourth installment setting up samba - copied smb.conf from 12.1 to 13.0, uncommented samba mounts in fstab, after a few tries rememberd to give me permission (smbpassword -a), installed adobe reader will tell firefox about it. for some reason firefox found it on it's own (wonders never cease). as far as dosemu goes I put the error message in google and the first hit returned: Hello, Dosemu doesn't run any more. the answer: > > you can check the value of > /proc/sys/vm/mmap_min_addr > and if it is non-zero, use > echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/mmap_min_addr That's exactly it. Big thanks. will contemplate this for a while noticed in that file number is 0 for slackware 12.1 but 4096 for 13.0 Recap: Suddenly realized I was about done! Changed the default boot in grub's menu.lst to 13.0. Most of the fiddling I had to do was inserting the new system into my existing setup. On a clean install in a single machine less would have to be done. Was thinking about what had to be done manually (for a new user). Slackware doesn't automatically set up the internet - need a setup program which is quite strait forward tho have had to fuss with which eth to use on a couple of installations (this one found it on reboot). It did automatically find the sound card which earlier versions didn't (needed to run alsaconfig). Also had to run localhost:631 to find the printer. Added users from the command line. KDE would have done these things graphically tho I prefer not to. still need to get dosemu to run but am still using 12.1 on my main machine. Also was pleased that the flash and adobe reader programs installed themselves as firefox pluggins - remember it took me a while to figure out how to do that previously. Now have three other machines to upgrade - will save the older installations as there are a bunch of programs I added from my movie editing days. still have to figure out how to add pluggins to digikam appendum 2: made above change and dosemu works fine. still to do - I like open office tried, installing a version I got from 12.2, couldn't find a binery in /usr/bin so removed, installed (ran) openoffice-autobuilder-multilang-3.1.1-noarch-22sm.tgz with the same results. got a bunch of files in /opt but nothing to run (I like open office). Did much of the same install stuff on my main machine - took a lot less time - still have to figure out how to do global install on the helper stuff for firefox - figure out what the words extension and plugin mean. appendum 3. installed audacity - seemed to be missing a bunch of libraries - something to do with gtk so installed everything I could find about gtk - still didn't work so ran aucacity and each time it asked for a library I copyied over one from 12.1. finally worked (about 10 libraries). then it had a permission problem bash-3.1$ audacity bt_audio_service_open: connect() failed: Connection refused (111) bt_audio_service_open: connect() failed: Connection refused (111) bash-3.1$ even with the error mesages (checked permission and groups for dev/dsp it records and plays. Guess I'll have to wonder what bt_audio is. onward: machine didn't power itself off - had forgotten to add append = "acpi=force" in my boot loader: kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda3 ro append = "acpi=force" also added echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/mmap_min_addr to /etc/rc.d/rc.local so dosemu works. think the bt line above has something to do with the extra card I put in to digitize video tapes. can't remember what it is called at the moment. (quick look at dmesg reminds me it is a video capture card.) (remember Einstein said it is not necessary to remember anything just remember where to look). on OpenOffice downloaded from slacky.eu an openoffice installer which complied the program on my machine (took a while). Couldn't find the binary, gave up for awhile, ran the installer a second time. then on a whim glanced at a README file and found the binary was called soffice which I ran and it worked (had I been rununning KDE most likely openoffice would appear on the menu). have some I gnome based programs I like (esp gnumeric) so went to http://gnomeslackbuild.org where there was good instructions how to setup (almost automatically) slapt-get (didn't keep track of my steps here) so installed the gnome suite. Didn't help with gnumeric at first but used gslapt-get and retrieved gnumeric - was missing one library which gslapt found and installed for me. Still missing a library for Hydrogen - a drum machine. Had hoped a complete gnome install would give me all the libraries - don't expect to use the gnome desktop much. Had been meaning to explore slapt-get - good to get the chance. totem complained so in gslapt in asked for gstreamer (contains plugins for totem) was several things there told gslapt to get/install all and totem started to work. Made error on one machine with gslapt and told it to "mark all upgrades" which it did and is now proceeding to upgrade the whole system and slackware.com is slow so have to do something else. not quite sure what happened or what got upgraded but everything seems to work now. BTW some of the hints I have been getting have been from Ubuntu sources so some of the tweaking I have been doing is not distribution dependent think this thread should be named slackware custom install. plan to upgrade my cousin's standalone computer think the only "tweaking" will be to run netconfig to get internet and localhost:631 to find the printer. finding glapt a breeze cuts down the work finding and installing extra programs. Doesn't seem to work from blackbox - have to change window managers to kde or gnome where it works fine: bash-3.1$ /usr/sbin/gslapt /var/slapt-get: Permission denied Please update permissions on /var/slapt-get or run with appropriate /privileges looked at /var/slapt-get seems like the permission is for all to execute but not write. maybe need a new group with write permission - will investigate. Also couldn't get kpackage to work -said it was missing a library which I installed. gslapt seems to have stored but not removed several of the slackware packages I had it install. have used up 6.8G of my 9.1G partition. Lucky I am storing /home on a larger (46G) partition. don't see why I can't remove them. then you are trying to run gslapt as a non root user. At the moment, the install script for the slackware packages attempts to detect utilities such as gnomesu, gtksudo, gksu, or kdesu. You can modify the /usr/share/applications/gslapt.desktop file to call one of these /utilities, if present, before the call to gslapt solved that ran kdesu gslapt finding the printer for dosemu and lpq in /etc/profile added LPDEST=name of the printer export LPDEST the name of the printer confused me for a bit, ran lpstat -p and used the output of that command for the name of the printer - seemed to work. digikam now supports remote storage 10/11/09 So this thread may never end. Went to my cousin (he is in his mid 70's) Am maintaining his computer (fairly new one). He has slackware 12.0 and 12.1 on seperate partitions. He runs 12.1 but has to boot 12.0 to play DVD's as I couldnt't make 12.1 do that. He is quite comfortable with firefox and thunderbird. though he won't delete anything so his inbox has hundreds of messages as well as his trash - don't see how he finds anything. Luckily he can insert new print cartridges himself as he also prints out everything. Found an unused partition (set the HD up with one windows partiton - which I used to set up DSL with the verizon CD and hasn't been used since). Have two linux partitions 9 or 10 Gigs. A larger partition for /home and storage. Discovered I had a third 10G partion which I had labled vfat as I thought we might be using windows and need to access that one thru windows. So the first mistake I made was to re-lable that one linux with fdisk. Forgot to write the change to disk so the slackware setup script didn't find sda8. This comfused me for a while (several reboots).(fised that) Reran the slackware install (quite quick). Grub refused to boot it so went back to 12.1, found the 12.2 grub package on line, installed that on 12.1, ran grubconfig, put back the orignal menu.lst and edited it to include 13.0, and the system booted. Ran out of inspiration at that point. think all I may have to do is to run netconfig to find the internet. Then may install slapt-get, flash, adobe reader and open office. (and symlink the existing /home on the large partion to 13.0 so all three versions of slackware are in synk.) Also found missing library for the Hydrogen drum machine in slacky.eu 12.0 multimedia. Installed it and drum machine works. Still am anoyned with slapt-get by leaving a bunch of packages in /var/slapt-get. Removed them by hand. Rather couldn't figure out how to select or tag a bunch of files with midnight commander to found thuner (xfce file manager)whihch works find for that. need dmuxer pluggin for totem 1. Install RealPlayer 10. 2. Copy nphelix.so to your Mozilla plugins directory and nphelix.xpt to your Mozilla components directory. 3. Make sure a symbolic link to the realplay script is in your PATH.