Anybody out there in “Its-Foss-land” using Slackware? This is my first time and any advice would be welcomed, especially with “lilo”, I have always used “grub” and lilo is my first for booting the distro.
The install was not that hard, just different!!!
Although lilo, can be configured to use gpt and uefi, I just opted for the msdos disk and used the mbr to install lilo.
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I would like to try Slackware.
Can you boot it with grub?
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If I am reading right, right now lilo is the default boot loader, grub is supposed to be added later. I want to be able to add LFS to that unallocated space and use lilo, in Slackware for booting. I just need to learn how to dual-boot with lilo.
Slackware, LFS and Gentoo are a lot alike, but Slackware and LFS do not have a package-manager like Gentoo and Portage.
If you learn something, pass it on, I was thinking that @daniel.m.tripp was a Slackware guru!!!
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Maybe 25+ years ago! I used it for a few years - I ran a POP / sendmail email server for the hospital I worked at (it was much easier to get working on Slackware 3 Linux than Solaris / SunOS) - it was fairly resilient - except when some dumb “nurse manager” decided to email a shonky 5 mb video “joke” to 35 of their colleagues and crashed the whole thing!
The last time I encountered Slackware - was leading up to Y2K and a customer had a box in a corner running Slackware, working as a squid proxy and firewall (dial up). But it was all glued together with undocumented (and mostly uncommented) shell scripts. I was the only Linux / UNIX resource in my company - and I didn’t like the chances of one of my colleagues having to support this.
So - over a weekend - I flashed the BIOS to be Y2K ready - and - installed Red Hat 6 (not RHEL) and got dialup (ppp) and iptables (or was it ipchains?) and squid working for the customer - with documentation (and pretty much NO shell scripts!).
So - I’ve tried Slackware out in VirtualBox a few times over the years - but never got very far. That was with kernel 1.2.13 - before modules (modules existed in the kernel 1.3 series - which was the beta for Kernel 2) - everything was monolithic…
I’m not really interested in slogging away with something difficult - these days I just want the fastest path to get a shell and a GUI that looks and feels a bit like MacOS (i.e. gnome).
Also - yeah - Slackware never adopted GRUB - they’re still using LILO…
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That is more experience than I have ever had with Slack!!! I was thinking on using Slack, as a host to help compile LFS, it has everything I need, just not sure on how to configure lilo for a dual boot. I may just have to stick with Gentoo!!!
Oh yeah - Patrick Volkerding’s installation guide for Slackware was spot on - I read nearly the whole thing… it was an excellent resource…
Printed it out at work on a laser printer (pre-duplexing printer days). It was over an inch thick on A4 paper (single sided). I tried out Slackware (3) on a spare 386 I had at home with 8 MB RAM in late 1995 (even got PPP dialup working, and ipchains NAT / internet sharing working). I didn’t deploy it as a “production” server O/S in a customer environment until around November 1996 (pop / sendmail at a hospital) - so by that time I was a bit of a Linux “gun” (I’d been using UNIX previously - mostly SunOS and DG-UX).
I have no idea how good the doco is these days…
I also love the connection between Slackware, and Church of the Sub-Genius :
(Magritte - “The Treachery of Images” - sometimes used by Church of the Sub-Genius - @callpaul.eu should be able to read that
)
Hmmm - maybe I should revisit Slackware - feeling nostalgic …
I should have left some space on the Dell laptop I’m running GhostBSD on… For me - running things like that virtualised just doesn’t cut the mustard (for me)…
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I tried Slackware exactly once and discovered it had no official dependency resolution, then promptly stopped using it knowing the amount of time researching all of this would take.
I’ll stick with Debian based distributions, thanks.
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I have no experience with Slackware. It still should be possible to use Grub. Maybe you could try to install grub if lilo isn’t working with dual boot. I did a quick search and you should have dual boot with lilo, just edit the /etc/lilo.conf
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Although I have seen and used many images from and around this idea, i have never read the full account as to why or where it comes from, thanks for the idea. During the 80’s a leading software house used that as the basis for the publicity but then went more down the echer route which i was more comfortable with.
This in mind I went back to my copies of puppy linux and in my collection I have the slackware distribution. But only use it for quick access to broken systems to get me access to the data. So never used it fully.
Yes It should be doable, now just point me too a website showing how to edit the “/etc/lilo.conf”
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Debian is a great distro, but it, just does not make a suitable host for compiling LFS!!!
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Never heard of HIM!!! Yes, I know Slackware goes back a long ways!!! Now can install VLC on Slackware?
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https://www.slackbook.org/html/booting-dual.html
That is a bit off because it’s more about windows and then it just says it is doable for Linux too 
Gentoo wiki gives more info: LILO - Gentoo wiki
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Thanks that helps!!! I knew Gentoo had lilo, but have never used lilo, may give it a try!!!
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@ihasama
I have tried Slackware15, and it would more than likely, make a fine Distro, if one is looking for a rather stable-locked-down Distro for Linux. For myself, I will, and am going back too Gentoo or try EndeavrouOS!!!
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I feel at home on Gentoo. It lets you to build your system and Portage is the best package manager. I’ve tried many Debian based oses, Arch, Void (best package manager of any binary distro IMHO), Solus, Antix, freeBSD, openSUSE, puppy, KDEneon, NixOS, Lite, Kali, Tails and some more… Slackware never but I do appreciate it being the oldest of them still being around. Haven’t tried anything from red hat enterprise though.
Dont bother , you have tried all the best distros.
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https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/jammy/man5/lilo.conf.5.html
It looks fairly simple.
Follow the examples on that man page
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I only install it on my home kit occasionally - because it’s what most of my customers run… I’d NEVER recommend it as a daily driver… Fedora seems okay though - but I prefer Ubuntu, Debian or Pop!_OS…
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Slack is too locked down for myself and for what I want to do, so back to the old drawing board!!!
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