Well, I got a slackware disc, I am going to try installing it, wish me luck.

The install went good, I only have a couple of problems.

Whenever I add a normal user, I had to create the home directory 'home/joshg' myself. Now the user joshg does not have write access to it, how do I add this?

And I have a serial port mouse, I think it is COM2 under Windows, how do I find this out for sure? And, how do I change it so it works with X? I am using WindowMaker (well going to use if my mouse works).

Thanks.....

I forgot, I am having one more problem. When I try to compile a driver for my winmodem it uses the kernel-headers. I get an error saying it will not work on SMP kernels. What is an SMP kernel? Do I need to have this enabled? It said I could disable it by changing something in my kernel headers, if I did this would I need to recompile my kernel? Thanks again......

[ This Message was edited by: mintegra on 2002-02-22 23:10 ]

ok, first things first

-->-->Whenever I add a normal user, I had to create
-->-->the home directory 'home/joshg' myself. Now
-->-->the user joshg does not have write access to
-->-->it, how do I add this?

This one is easy.
1) Log in as root.
2) cd into /home
3) # chown :
on most linux distributions (as long as you haven't changed it) the username and the usergroup are the same.

-->--> And I have a serial port mouse, I think it
-->--> is COM2 under Windows, how do I find this
-->--> out for sure? And, how do I change it so
-->-->it works with X?

COM1 = /dev/ttys0 in linux
COM1 = /dev/ttys1 in linux, and so on
configure GPM (that console mouse thingy) so that it uses the serial port you have you mouse on. You can check that in Windows in the Dev man. Also don't forget to tell X that your mouse is on /dev/ttysX (X = port num). The easiest way to configure X is to use xf86config. There it also asks you for the device the mouse is connected to.

-->--> What is an SMP kernel?

SMP = Symmetric Multi Processing or something. Anyways, it's involved with machines using multiple processors. Maybe try to compile a new kernel without SMP support (I hope you only have 1 processor ). That should fix the problem, and you should be able to compile the thingy.

Have fun, and ask if you can't get something to work
[addsig]

Where could I find out how to disable SMP? And how to compile my kernel?

to disable smp you have to recompile your kernel - however, if your current one is running chances are good it's dsiabled already

slackware should give you a choice of kenrels to install...

It gave me four choices of kernels, two of them for scsi, the other two for ide. Neither of them said anything about SMP. I only have one proccesor, so I don't need it enabled. I read /usr/doc/Linux-HOWTOs/Kernel-HOWTO and I disabled SMP in /usr/src/linux/.config. I followed the instructions and compiled the kernel, copied it over vmlinuz, tried to boot and it said something about it being to big....

hmm...
did you run "make zImage"?
try "make bzImage" next time, that should prevent it from getting too big...
Other than that, kernels usually work, if they compile correctly and you didn't make any bad mistakes in the configuration.. There are however some strange anecdotal cases of kernels just not wanting to boot like peter's "EBDA too big"...

EBDA too big - Same error I got.

I did use bzImage. The one think I think I did wrong was editing .config by myself instead of 'make config', could this be the problem?

if you did it right, no... try "make menuconfig", that's a nice ncurses interface. There's Also "make xconfig" for a tk interface.

you should only use "make config" if you like SM, if you know what I mean
[addsig]

sm? sadomasochism?

yep, exactly that one
then your PC is the S, and you're the M!
I prefer "make menuconfig" or editing the config file directly
[addsig]