Michael, > Well, I get half-way through the Slackware install and then try to > install to the root partition and that's as far as I can go. <sighs> Are you talking about installing lilo, where it gives you the option of installing it to either the master boot record (MBR) or the superblock of the root partition? I always use the MBR not the superblock, but if you are talking about lilo install failing, you actually have not lost your whole install, just the bootloader install. Sometimes the lilo install will fail, and if so you keep going to the end of the slackware install, then you can do what I've been saying about booting any drive that won't boot: Boot from floppy or CD-ROM with the generic kernel, I think even a disk with the speakup kernel will work, but you need to do this at the boot prompt: boot: bare.i root=/dev/hda1 noinitrd ro That would be using the slackware bare.i kernel, but I think you could do the same with speakup kernel like this: boot: speakup.s speakup_synth=ltlk root=/dev/hda1 noinitrd ro You're loading the kernel from removable media but booting to the root filesystem on hard drive. Even if lilo failed to install, once you have booted the new system this way, check the lilo.conf to make sure it look correct then just run lilo to install the bootloader lilo -v > Is there a way to install slackware that bypasses all the > stupid menus? No because it launches all of the various scripts that create all the directories and unpack all the tar files, create config files etc. > The docs say just to type in the kernal's name: speakup.s speakup.s This is like the bare.i (standard IDE) disk, but has support for Speakup (and since there was space, support for Adaptec's AIC7xxx SCSI controllers is also included) Speakup provides access to Linux for the visually impaired community. It does this by sending console output to a number of different hardware speech synthesizers. It provides access to Linux by making screen review functions available. For more information about speakup and its drivers check out: http://www.linux-speakup.org. To use this, you'll need to specify one of the supported synthesizers on the bootdisk's boot prompt: ramdisk speakup_synth=synth where 'synth' is one of the supported speech synthesizers: acntpc, acntsa, apolo, audptr, bns, decext, dectlk, dtlk, ltlk, spkout, txprt This is from here: http://www.slackware.com/install/bootdisk.php
