Getting a new hard drive is a bit of a task. I got my new 120 GB hard drive Friday. I spent half of the day messing around with it and the rest playing Enemy Territory. There was an error caused by the new hard drive. One might guess that getting a new hard drive is a 5 minute process, but not when you decide to replace your old hard drive with this new hard drive. It's like a drive crash without the unpleasantness of pressure but with the pressure of getting everything working. I'd like to list my procedure for all those who don't know how to install Linux on a blank hard drive. It's a bit of a list, but it is not rocket science.

1. Put Slackware CD into CD-ROM.
2. Configure BIOS to boot off CD-ROM.
3. Press return when given a Slackware screen.
4. Press return when asked for keyboard layout.
5. Type root at the login.
6. Type cfdisk /dev/hda at the prompt.
7. Delete any current partition.
8. Add a 20000 MB Linux Partition.
9. Add a 100000 MB Linux Partition.
10. Add a 1024 MB Linux Partiton.
11. Change the third Partiton to type 83, Swap.
12. Write partition table to disk. Wait 1 minute.
13. Type setup at the prompt.
14. Go to ADD SWAP.
15. Allow it to detect swap /dev/hda3 and format. Wait 1 minute.
16. Go to TARGET.
17. Allow it to detect primary partition /dev/hda1 and format. Wait 1 minute.
18. Allow it to detect primary partition /dev/hda2.
19. Make the partition control /home .
20. Allow it to format. Wait 1 minute.
21. Go to SOURCE
22. Pick "Install from CD-ROM" and allow it to detect CD-ROM.
23. Go to SELECT
24. Check all boxes.
25. Go to INSTALL
26. Pick "full" from the Prompting Mode screen. Wait 15 minutes. Switch CDs. Wait 10 minutes.
27. At the Install Linux Kernal screen, pick 'cdrom'.
28. Pick bare.i kernel.
29. At the Make Bootdisk screen, choose continue.
30. Pick US/Pacific time zone.
31. Set hardware clock to local time.
32. At the LILO screen, pick simple.
33. Pick 1024x768x256 frame buffer console.
34. Pick MBR.*
35. Write Hostname as 'ASLinWS01'.
36. Write domain name as 'altsci.com'
37. Pick KDE as Window Manager.
38. Choose a secure password for your root password.
39. Do not forget your password. Do not write it down. Think about it again and again and again.
40. Exit.
41. Press Ctrl-Alt-Delete.
42. Remove CD-ROM from drive before boot.
43. Hopefully LILO will boot up. If not, you probably forgot to pick MBR at the LILO. Time to mess around with LILO.
44. Use the Slackware CD-ROM as a boot disk if LILO doesn't work. It has instructions on how to boot.
45. Login as root with your secure password.
46. Run groupadd developers
47. Run adduser
48. User name is 'jvoss' for me, different for you.
49. Type in the info you know. Give the user group 'users' with subgroup 'developers'.
50. Run passwd jvoss
51. Give user a secure password.
52. Run exit
53. Login as user created earlier.
54. Run xf86config
55. Give it what it wants. Major things are: mouse, monitor frequencies, video card drivers, and resolution/colors. Yes, it is hard, but yes it does work.
56. Run startx
57. Depending on your setup, you may need to do many strange things to get XF86 to work. If you use nVidia, you'll need to download closed source drivers from http://nVidia.com/ to get 3d acceleration and such.

At that point, you should have Linux running with the KDE GUI just like I did on Friday. At that point, I copied my old data over. Certain things I had trouble with were:

There you have it. If you have a different system, you need to change some of the data above. But I think it's useful to have a list of things that do not take every possible situation into account. If a person is stuck, they can look at this and say, well Jav did it this way, so that must be what I am missing.

Figuring out how to recompile PHP took me a long time (a week of fiddling, I remember). Until Slackware compiles in XML DOM into PHP, it will not be a turnkey solution to employ XML DOM in PHP websites. Of course, Slackware users know how to complile Linux programs as complex as PHP to make it happen. I am one and you should be too.

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