Base Operating System

Slack 8.1 There is a updated root image available from my project page on sourceforge. Slack 8.1 users, you need to use the existing boot and kernel floppy images, plus the new 8.1 root disk. For those wanting 8.0 the older images are still available. As it currently stands I have no plans to update this page to cover the differences between the 8.0 and 8.1 installer. So slack 8.1 users, install with care.

How to Install

The normal way to install Linux onto more or less anything is via a bootable CDROM, which leads me to the first problem, the C1Vx does not have one. Sure there a optional PCMCIA drive that Sony sells, but this is horribly overpriced and of very limited use to me, so I do not own one. OK without a CDROM the only way to install Linux is via a network, which is the only installation method I discuss in this HOWTO.

Now onto the first problem. To install from a network you need to boot up with something, right?. Which is the first issue, the C1Vx has a USB floppy drive, which BIOS support will allow to boot the first Linux install floppy, after that floppy support in effect vanishes when you need to insert the second floppy as the none of the Slackware boot disk Kernels support the use of USB floppies. This counts as bad! and resulted in much bad language. So I had to fix this, the following sections detail my solution.

My Patched Floppies

My solution to the floppy problem, as I said above was to patch the existing disks. Now as I had to do work, on both the boot and root floppies, I thought why not add some of the Picturebook patches that make life easier from day one, which is exactly I ended up doing. The next few sections briefly covers what I did to the floppies and also the Kernel. Currently only Slackware 8 and 2.4.17 kernel are supported, with all being available from my sourceforge page. You need the following files, in order to make use of this HOWTO.

• Boot floppy image
• Root floppy image
• Optimized Kernel

UPDATE: Its been reported that these disks are useful for installing Debian, have a look at this page for more on that one.

About my boot floppy

There are some things you need to understand about my boot floppy, before you can continue.

• The Kernel is 2.4.17 and has been patched (read butchered!) to support USB floppies, its not suitable for anything other than installation use.
• Only the following PCMCIA network cards are supported:- 3c574, 3c589, NE2000, and Linksys PCMLM56.
• There is no sound, Firewire, video4Linux, normal floppy, CDROM, APM/ACPI support at all.
• The Fullscreen Console mode patch is already applied.
• The Sony PCMCIA CDROM is NOT supported.
• YOU USE THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK, OF YOUR SYSTEM DIES, CATCHES FIRE, EXPLODES, OR SUFFERS SOME OTHER BAD THING, ITS YOUR FAULT :-)

About my root floppy

Just like my new boot disk, there are some things that you need to know about my patched color.gz root disk. This time its not really that bad, the only updates here are; a patch to allow the setup script to use /dev/sda as the floppy in place of /dev/fd0, support for ext2 filesystem is removed to be replaced by PCMCIA support, which means the Slackware supplied PCMCIA support disk is no longer required. Other than that its the normal image as per the slak8 CD.

About my Kernel

This is something that you would not normally find as part of a Linux HOWTO, sure some give you the .config file, but very few give the actually pre-compiled Kernel. Now before I get emails, I also give you the .config file for you to build your own Kernel. Now this HOWTO assumes you use my Kernel, be warned. Included in this Kernel, as I mentioned earlier is pre-configured support for all the following hardware.

• USB Floppy
• USB Memory Stick
• PCMCIA/Cardbus
• Motion Eye Camera
• Sound
• Jogdial
• IEE1394/Firewire
• Full screen Console Patch (ATI Mobility)

Making the floppies.

Now you have downloaded all three of my floppy images you need to make the actual disks from the images. This is done like this, on another Linux system.

bzip2 -d boot.bz2

TIP: For help with handling compressed files under Linux/Unix/OSX see my HOWTO, which covers most of the common formats in detail.

Insert a blank floppy in your floppy drive

dd if=slack8_boot.img of=/dev/fd0

Now do the same for the other two image files.

Starting the installation

Before you start the installation proper, you need to make sure you have the following ready :-

• The boot floppy you just made, from my image.
• The root floppy (color.gz) made, from my image.
• The Kernel disk made from my image.
• A NFS server to install from, (You need the IP address and directory name)
• Supported PCMCIA network card in the system, and cabled right.

Now down to it. As if its a surprise, you start the installation by booting with the my boot floppy, you just created. At the boot prompt, just press enter, as you do not need to pass any additional parameters to the Kernel. At this point, be prepared to wait a while, the USB floppy is not exactly fast. Eventually you will see the following prompt :-

VFS: Insert root floppy disk to be loaded into RAM disk then press ENTER

At this point, insert the root disk you created from my image, and press enter. This as with the boot disk will take a while, so its coffee time again. Eventually you will see the following prompt :-

<OPTION TO LOAD SUPPORT FOR NON-US KEYBOARD> if you are not using a US keyboard,
you may load a different keyboard map. To select a different keyboard map, please enter now.
To continue using the US map, just press enter. Enter to select a keyboard map:

As it says if you are using a US keyboard, just press enter, otherwise I urge you to read the Slackware doco on keyboard maps.

At this point the PCMCIA support will start, you can ignore any errors displayed, as they are non-critical, and will be removed/fixed in later versions of my root disk image. Now you move onto dealing with the disk partitions.

Disk Partitions

Unlike some of the other distributions, the Slackware installation process does almost nothing to help you partition your disks, so I will cover it in slightly more detail than I otherwise would, in this section.

There are two tools that are provided to partition your disk, these are fdisk and cfdisk. They are quite different in use, firstly fdisk is not even close to being user friendly, and is intended for advanced users (if thats you, why are you reading this!!), on the other hand cfdisk does provide a fairly friendly user interface, and is recommended for new users. So cfdisk it is.

Partitions

As a absolute minimum you need to create two partitions, one being the for your swap space, the other the rest of the disk. Its normally a good idea to separate things like / /usr /opt /home etc all onto different partitions, and for my 30GB disk I used the following sizes and mount points.

Sizing

The sizing is really up to you, so for clarity in this HOWTO we are only going to use 2 partitions, sized as follows

Using cfdisk

Now I am assuming that you want to use the whole disk for Linux, (remember I do not support/recommend/care about dual booting, sorry folks!), so run cfdisk like this.

cfdisk -z

The use of the -z switch will, cause cfdisk to not even try to read any existing partitions on the disk. This is not really necessary in most cases, but I have found its easier than explaining HOWTO delete partitions etc.

First we create the big 11.5GB partition. To do this run cfdisk as above, now from the main cfdisk screen, using the arrow keys, select new from the options at the bottom of the screen, then primary, 11500 as the size, then beginning (to put it at the beginning of the disk), then bootable (to make sure it boots). And thats it for the first partition, now moving onto the swap partition, press down arrow, then again select new, then 'primary' then just press enter to use the rest of the disk, then type, then 82 (for Linux swap). Done, thats all it takes, now select write to actually write the new partition table to the disk, here you are prompted to confirm you want to write to the disk (yes your point of no return). After writing to the disk select quit to exit cfdisk.

Running setup

Having now created your disk partitions, you now need to start the slackware setup program (oh alright its a shell script), just type 'setup' to start this. First a note of warning, you will see two error lines complaining about /dev/sda having a invalid partition table, just ignore them, as they are non-critical and will be fixed in later versions of my disks.

Addswap

The first step of the installation is to setup the swap partition you created earlier. So select 'Addswap' from the main menu, the setup script will detect your partition, and ask you to confirm that this is the one you want to use, which it is, so just confirm it. Now for those worried that they have not setup the partition table right, the setup script will soon complain if thats the case, if it complains then you need to go back to the last sections. After you confirm that your swap partition is right, the script will format it, this again takes a while so be patent. As soon as the formatting is finished you will see a 'swap space configured' dialog confirming all is well with the world. There is nothing to do here, so just press enter to continue on.

Now you will see a dialog thats prompting you to continue with the installation or return to the main menu. Believe it or not you do want to continue on with the installation, so select 'yes' then press enter to, and setup the Target drives.

Installation Partition

At this point you need to select which partition will be the / root for the installation. As we only created one partition this is going to be real easy, just press enter to select the default. Now you are prompted to 'format partition', which has three options, quick format, slow format and no format. The choice here depends on how much you trust that 12GB Hitachi drive in the C1Vx, if like me not at all, you will do a slow format, and go get lunch while it formats. On the other hand if you are a brave sort, just use the fast format, and get a sandwich!. Make your selection and press enter to move onto 'file system' selection.

File system selection

There are normally two possible filesystem types supported by Slackware out of the box, these are ext2 and reiser. But in this case, as I said earlier the ext2 support is removed, leaving the only choice as reiser. Reiser is a journaling filesystem thats always current and so is more resistant to "laptop flat battery' where as ext2 is not and does have the risk of corruption/data loss when you battery goes flat, which made the removal of the ext2 a no brainer. That said press enter to start the formatting, which even with the fast format will take a while. Eventually when this finishes you will get a confirmation dialog telling you all is still well with the world. Just press enter to continue on and select your installation source.

Installation Source

There are 4 possible install methods supported by the installer scripts, of these we are going to use NFS installation, which is option 3 (as if you needed to be told that!). So select option 3, then press enter to move on, to setup your TCP/IP. The information you will be prompted for is as follows :-

1. Your IP address
2. Your netmask
3. Your gateway (yes/no question)

Thats it for your local setup, if you are on a network, you may need to speak to your administration support to get the above information. Anyway once you are happy, you now need to setup the following for the NFS server you are going to install from. You are prompted for the following parameters

1. Server IP address
2. Directory (exported volume!) on the server containing the Slackware install files

At this point you will return to text mode, and will see a list of mounted devices, check to see if your NFS server is one of them. If its there (and it should be!) you answer no to the 'Do you need to try setting up NFS again ([y]es, [n]o)?', to move on to select the Slackware package categories to install.

Package Categories

At this point you need to choose which package collections you want to install. Here you have two ways to proceed these are :-

Install X Windows later

This is my recommended option. If you go this way, no X, Gnome, KDE or anything else thats X related, from the Slackware distribution is installed. As to why you would do this, there are any number of reasons, in this case the standard X installation is interesting, I tested it and found it lacking, slow and buggy. Also its (just like the rest of the distribution) is optimized for i386, not your Crusoe (i586). Now if you take my advice you will be installing X, WindowMaker and several libraries all from source using my X from source HOWTO. This will give you a optimized X and Windowmaker installation, and if you feel the need you can use my mini-gnome HOWTO to install enough libraries to run Gnome applications. Be warned this takes a while, think in the order of hours.

Install X Windows now

If you go this way, its much quicker than building from source, but you do get i386 optimized code, and a X installation thats less than wonderful, it was slow, and crashed often.

The choice is yours. I have detailed the different package selections you need for both in the table below :-

Once you have set the above, just press enter to continue on, to the package confirmation screen, which is your last chance to stop the install. So once you are happy, you continue onto the 'prompting mode' section dialog, which you just press enter, to use the full installation mode, which despite the on screen comment about installing everything, all this does is install what you selected without prompting you for confirmation on each package. Be warned, this part of the installation takes a while, so time for a coffee. When this installation finally finishes, you move onto the Kernel installation.

Kernel Installation

As expected you need to install a Kernel in order for the system to boot, for this there are 4 choices, bootdisk, CDROM, Floppy or Skip. This is well worth some more discussion, so I will cover each option separately.

1. Boot disk. This option will use the hacked Kernel off my boot disk. Which while this will work, is not recommended, as I did things to that Kernel to make it work that should not be done to a Kernel. If you use this, your system will boot, but with screen fulls of errors. So be warned!
2. CDROM. What CDROM???
3. Floppy. Install a Kernel from a dos FAT formatted floppy disk. This is the option I am recommended, as it lets you use my fully optimized Kernel.
4. Skip. This one skips anything custom, and just uses the Kernel off the installation NFS share (in this case!). DO NOT USE THIS it does not work with the reiser file system, you system will boot then dive into the turf with a Kernel panic.

So select option 3, to install the Kernel from the floppy you created earlier from my image file. Once finished, you will move onto configuring your system, and yes you are asked for confirmation that you really want to configure your system.

System Configuration

The first part of the configuration is to make a book disk. In this case no need (also its broken for the time being), so skip this and select continue, onto the 'Modem configuration'.

Modem configuration

Here you can configure your modem, by modem it means a real modem, not one of those nasty Windoze specific POS. All this really does it set which comm port the modems attached to. You can do this later if your modem is not attached, also think about it the C1Vx has no port for a Modem, and the Modem on the C1VN is a WinModem. Make your selection to move on.

CDROM configuration

If you had a CDROM then this is the point to configure it, but as thats not the case, so just select no, to move on to screen font configuration.

Screen fonts

Say no here. This will break the fullscreen screen console patch, thats part of my optimized Kernel.

Lilo installation

Now you install the LILO boot loader. There are three options here, you can use what ever you like, is does not matter as you are going to replace the lilo configuration with one optimal for the system, in the post install stuff later on, so just press enter to accept the defaults and move onto the mouse configuration. The only thing thats need to be said is that LILO will be installed on the MBR which will break dual booting systems. You where warned earlier, that I do not support, recommend or do anything else with dual booting.

Mouse configuration

Your mouse is a 'ps2', so select this and press enter to continue on with the next stage of the mouse setup.

GPM Setup

This is the daemon that supports the mouse while you are out of X. Its optional, so make your selection and press enter to move onto the network configuration.

Network Configuration

At this point you are prompted to configure your networking, TCP/IP, Hostname etc. Its a fairly safe bet that you do want to do this, so select yes, then press enter to move onto set the hostname. You do not need to be worried about this, as if you make any errors, you can reconfigure using the 'netsetup' command at any time.

Hostname

Enter the hostname (name of the machine) for your system here, then press enter to move onto the domain name setup.

Domain Name

Enter the domain name you want to use. Then press enter to move onto the IP configuration.

IP setup

There are three options for this one, DHCP, static or loopback. Make your selection here then press enter to move onto the network card setup.

Network Card Probing

You are now prompted to probe for your network card. Probing can in some cases cause system lock ups, but in this case is safe (your using my boot disk, with its PCMCIA compatibility with several cards) and recommended that you do probe. So select probe and press enter to move on. Thats it, the end of the network setup, now its onto the Sendmail configuration.

Sendmail Configuration

The default SMTP for this one is good for the majority of users. In doubt, and you are on a network check with you administration people to be sure. Make your selection, then press enter to move onto the time setup.

Time

Not much I need to say about this one, you just need to set your system time. Most people will have there local time set to local time. Make you selection then enter to move onto setting your time zone.

At this point if you took my advise and did not install X, then you can skip the next section, moving onto the root password setup. On the other hand if you installed X, then there is more to do, so read on.

Default Window Manager

This is where you set the default window manager you will use with X. I use WindowMaker, but thats just personal choice, so make your choice and press enter to move on setting the root user password. One word of warning, if you select WindowMaker here, its not configured for any users at all, you need to run wmaker.inst the first time you log in.

Root Password Setup

You really really need to do this. A Linux/UNIX box especially a laptop is like a bank with a open vault door, madness. So select yes and set the password. Thats it the end of the base operating system installation. Now you need to perform the post installation stuff I mentioned earlier.

Post installation setup

OK, now exit the Slackware setup script, but DO NOT REBOOT. Once out of the setup script, run the following script

SeTvaio

This will fix the Lilo configuration, and create a few additional files you need. Once you have done this, thats it the end, time for a reboot.

Links and Related Pages

• Picturebook Linux Home
• Console Patch
• Firewire
• IDE Hard Disk
• Jogdial
• Optimized Kernel
• Motion Eye Camera
• PCMCIA
• Sonypi Driver
• Sound
• USB Floppy drive
• X Windows