Installing Slackware Linux Part 5 - Post Install Configuration
When
the system cycles, you'll be at the LILO boot prompt. This is still
the virtual machine, but in the real installation on the IDE disk we
partitioned, liloconfig didn't add my Windows boot choice to the
lilo.conf file. So what I see is exactly the same. Probably because I
used the NTFS filesystem. We'll be fixing that up soon, it's not
difficult.
Hit
enter to start Slackware Linux, and you'll be at the logon prompt.
Type root as the username, and you will be prompted for the
root password you set near the end of setup.
The
first thing you should probably do, is create a user for yourself.
You must not use the root user account for normal operation of the
system. The Slackware adduser script makes this very easy, by
interactively prompting you for information instead of making you
supply it with switches on the command line.
Type
adduser as root, and then you will be prompted to enter a
username. Use lower case for the username.
For most of the
prompts you will just want to hit enter to accept the defaults unless
you have a specific reason. Let it default to the next available user
ID, hit enter to use /bin/bash (unless you want to use another shell
of course), accept the default home directory, and accept the default
of no expiry date.
You may want to enter a "full name"
(I like to pick something humorous). You will then be prompted to
type the user's password twice for confirmation. A user can change
his own password any time, using the passwd command.
The
rest of the configuration steps can really be done in any order,
according to what is most important to you. You may want to get the
XFree86 GUI started first, so you can use GUI based text editors and
such, if you're unfamiliar with working from the command line.
The
first thing I'd want to do is get my network going (if it isn't
already). The netconfig utility that ran during setup, could not
probe for my network adapter. However, I know that it uses the
sundance module. How did I know that? Well, when I first
bought those NICs, I typed D-Link 530TXS Linux (the "S"
is significant in the model number) into a search engine (Google) and
found the tidbit I needed in mailing list archives and the
like.
Now, during setup we configured our network with the
exception of the driver module for the network adapter. That means,
all we have to do is load the module, and start the network.
Slackware's startup scripts look for a script file named rc.netdevice
in the /etc/rc.d directory. This is where the system init
scripts are located on Slackware system. (It uses the BSD style init
script mechanism)
It is very easy to create this file from the
command line. As root, type:
echo "/sbin/modprobe
sundance" > /etc/rc.d/rc.netdevice
This will
redirect the output of the echo command into the specified text file
that will get created. The quotes are important, because there is a
space in the string we are echoing. Use the correct module name for
your network adapter, of course.
Now, set the file
executable:
chmod 755 /etc/rc.d/rc.netdevice
That's
it, on the next reboot your network should
initialize.
Alternatively, to load a network adapter module,
you could uncomment the appropriate module loading line (or add one)
in the /etc/rc.d/rc.modules init script.
Now, I don't
feel like rebooting at the moment, so I'm going to just type a few
simple commands to start the network.
I'm
loading the module, then using the ifconfig utility to specify
the interface, IP address of the machine, and subnet mask, and then
using the route command to specify my router as the
gateway.
You probably will want to attempt to start the
XFree86 GUI now. By default, Slackware is set up to use the VESA
Framebuffer driver for your display hardware. The /etc/X11/XF86Config
file is a copy of the file XF86Config-vesa in the same directory.
So
if you type startx you may have a usable GUI if the settings
are compatible with your display hardware. That will do in a pinch,
but you will want to properly configure XFree86 and use the
accelerated driver for your video card (which hopefully exists,
otherwise you've got some generic options)
I put the
XFree86/Xorg configuration for Slackware in a separate tutorial,
which you can read here:
Configuring
X in Slackware
(Opens in new window)
Next, I want to get LILO straightened
around, so I can boot that Windows XP installation. At this point I
have no way of starting it.
As root, open the /etc/lilo.conf
file with a text editor. I drew a box around the section that I
added, to the bottom of the file.
Lines
that start with # are comments, and are ignored.
This
is called "chainloading". What we are doing, is instructing
LILO to pass control over to whatever code is in the /dev/hda1
partition's boot sector. It does not have to know anything about the
filesystem or the operating system on the partition. In this case,
that's the code in the boot sector that finds ntldr; Windows XP's own
boot loader. Any additional Windows operating systems that the
Windows XP boot loader's boot.ini file is configured to start (e.g.
Win9x) will be available from the ntldr menu as well.
What you
will see in the LILO boot menu, is the label windows.
While
you are editing lilo.conf, you probably will want to change the
timeout to a more reasonable value. It defaults to 1200, which
is 2 minutes. (The value is in 10ths of a second, so a value of 300
is 30 seconds)
After you are finished editing the lilo.conf
file, you must run the lilo command (or /sbin/lilo if /sbin
isn't in your path) to rewrite the changes, or they will have no
effect.
As root, type lilo and you should see in the
output that it has added both Linux and windows to the
configuration.
I rebooted the machine, and I can start both
Linux and windows.
If you ever want to access that NTFS
filesystem from within Linux (read-only support for NTFS), you will
have to load the ntfs kernel module, and mount the
filesystem.
Create a mount point (an empty directory)
mkdir
/mnt/windows
Load the kernel module.
modprobe
ntfs
Mount the filesystem.
mount -t ntfs
/dev/hda1 /mnt/windows
You access it from /mnt/windows.