Slackware 10.1 on AMD64 with SATA

- STEFi - 2005-04-11 20:33:42
AMD released the new Athlon64 last year and soon new Linux port come up. Firstly, there isn't any official Slackware release so I choose SLAMD64 and successfully installed it....

Where to download
The project home page is on http://www.slamd64.com/. You could download ISO images from 2 ftp mirrors. Slamd64 has 2 cd
installation cd but if you don't need KDE you could burn only first one.

ftp://ftp.scarlet.be/pub/slamd64/slamd64%2010.1%20RC1/slamd64-C31-RC1-disk1.iso
ftp://ftp.scarlet.be/pub/slamd64/slamd64%2010.1%20RC1/slamd64-C31-RC1-disk2.iso

Tested hardware
AMD Athlon 3GHz for socket 939
MSI Neo 4 (chipset nvidia), PCIExpress graphics card ATI X600, S-ATA hard disk

Before you begin
You should take into consideration several problems. The biggest problem is SATA hard disk and the second one is graphics card
in PCIExpress slot. Installation CD of Slamd contains 2 version of kernel with SATA support. First, SATA.i, is compiled with old-type
SATA support and sata.s is compiled with libsata (device accessed via SCSI subsystem). I wasn't able to recognize disk with old-type sata.i
but try it. I was successful with sata.s which detected my disk as /dev/sda but there was problem during installation process. When I tried
to make file system on partition or make swap the segmentation fault occurred. I decided to use official kernel from Slack 10.1 and make
boot and root discs.

What you need
- PC with amd64 architecture
- 2 cd of slamd64 (maybe the fist one is enough for people don't need KDE)
- 3 floppy discs: 1 - boot disk, 2 - root disc nr. 1, 3 - root disc nr.2
Boot and root images you can download from you favorite ftp site, for example:
boot disc:
ftp://ftp.linux.cz/pub/linux/slackware/slackware-10.1/bootdisks/sata.i
root discs:
ftp://ftp.linux.cz/pub/linux/slackware/slackware-10.1/rootdisks/install.1
ftp://ftp.linux.cz/pub/linux/slackware/slackware-10.1/rootdisks/install.2

There is only one SATA kernel version for creating boot disc, sata.i but it works :)
You can create floppy disc from Windows with rawrite (included in ftp directory) or from *nix with dd.
Additional information are in README file.

Installation
1. boot from boot floppy disc (and both root discs)
2. choose keymap (or leave US)
3. login as root
4. allocate your hard drive with cfdisk or fdisk: disc is attached as /dev/sdX (in my case /dev/sda)
5. proceed as normal installation
6. configuration
The most important and problematic part is lilo. At first you have to choose kernel source,
I choose from floppy disk (insert boot disk into floppy drive). Next step is where to install lilo, I choose MBR (master boot sector)
but unfortunately setup program show the error message (like problem during installation to MBR), ugh.
I insert boot cd into cdrom drive and reboot system. After reboot standard Slackware installation screen was showed.
I typed to lilo prompt:

sata.s root=/dev/sda1 noinird ro

and confirm by enter. The new installed Slamd64 boot with kernel from CD, great :)

For the finishing the installation process I had to do several things. First I compiled new kernel, 2.6.9 version from source
from installation cd, with SATA support (don't forget enable experimental driver in kernel configuration because
SATA support (libata) is still experimental). After compilation new image should be found in /arch/x86_64/boot. Copy new kernel
to /boot and edit /etc/lilo.conf (don't forget run lilo after edit). Reboot :)

What next
After reboot I tried to run Xorg and it started successfully in high resolution mode. Further advances will be written soon.