[PLUG] slackware download process????

[AthlonRob]

On Sun, 2004-05-09 at 11:53, Brian Quade wrote:
> I have been trying to figure out to download the current slackware 
> distribution.  I read much of the documentation and am still confused.  
> Every other time I download a cd installation, it comes in the form of 
> an iso file that I just burn onto a disc.  

Let's hold up here for just a second... are you burning an ISO file onto
a disk as a file or as an image?  You need to burn it as an image... if
you mount the CD and do an ls, you should see many files, not just an
ISO file.  :-)

> But slackware has different 
> kernels and options, so the documentation explains how to create the iso 
> using mkisofs assuming I already have the whole directory structure (or 
> just the files I need) on my machine.  But I can't find any 
> documentation about how to download all of those files into the correct 
> directories other than to create the directories by hand and then 
> download each file by hand into the proper directory.  There must be a 
> simpler way to do this.

AFAIK, you should be able to boot most of the kernels from Pat's default
CD.  Do you think you'll need a funky kernel?  Those CD making
instructions are simply to help you make an ISO out of a set of files if
you need to do something funky.

And to get them all, download the whole directory tree.  Most ftp
utilities out there more advanced than the commandline 'ftp' are able to
handle this.  I'm not sure, but I think 
wget ftp://ftp.scarlet.be/pub/slackware/slackware-9.1/ will do the
trick.

> The documentation also refers to a program 
> called loadlin, but it is not very clear about whether loadlin is only 
> for dos installs or if you can use it to install over an old 
> (non-slackware) linux install or do a clean install.

Those instructions are up there for people trying to install Slackware
on ultra-low-memory boxes, essentially.  We're talking like 5MB of
RAM... where the initrd is too big.  :-)

As Rich stated, loadlin only works with DOS and really, you don't need
to worry about it.

As Rich said... just pop in the CD and use the default ide kernel, you
should be good to go.  :-)

Rob