Fwd: [NTLUG:Discuss] Slackware

[Justin M. Forbes]

On Mon, Oct 03, 2005 at 02:21:54PM -0500, Tom Tumelty wrote:
> I am installing Slackware 10.1 (which i forgot to mention ) but it seems to
> use same install program as slackware has for a long time. The machine is an
> IBM and has a scsi drive and dual processors (about 400 MHZ each).
> 
That might explain the slowness with Ubuntu... 400Mhz is slow for desktop
use, and even using dual CPUs wont speed that up a ton.  Multiple
applications will balance among the available processors, but a lot of
things are done in a single thread, thus will only use one CPU. SMP is
great for a server, or development, or desktops where you are doing several
things at once.  The extra CPU is rarely of much use in end user desktops
speeding up a single application.

> Also, I was not able to read the scsi disk(s) with fdisk or cfdisk, the two
> partiitoning programs with slackware. When I started the install program it
> seemed to recognize the partitions created by ubuntu so i decided to use
> them and see if it would work. I did not get any errors while installing and
> did a check for bad blocks while formatting. ALso tried to install LILO to
> MBR and tried to install LILO to the root partition, each time same
> result......bios would start then grub would try to do its thing and the
> system would quit during grubs attempt to boot the system.
> 
It has been many years since I have used lilo, and many more since I have
used slackware, but generally if fdisk doesnt recognize the SCSI disk, it
would mean the installer kernel is missing the drivers for your SCSI card.
That would not make sense with being able to install on the Ubuntu
partitions though unless the Slackware installer has several kernel modules
it does not probe until after you fdisk.
if you can get a shell through a rescue disk, and mount your existing
slackware install from there, you should be able to chroot into your
slackware installation and edit your lilo.conf correctly.  After that is
done run lilo and it will install.  If it is not overwriting your grub
stage1 (the boot message), then something is wrong with the slackware
setup.  This could be kernel related.
> 
> what is SMP ?
> 
SMP is the term used for configurations with more than one CPU.  To find
out if the kernel you are running supports SMP, you can 'cat
/proc/cpuinfo' This should list every CPU on the system that the kernel
sees.  If you have more than one, the system supports SMP.

Justin