Hi,

I recently installed my favourite linux distro on a friend of mine's laptop. Installation went fine, but i'm now struggling with the configuration. There are a several problems I have:

1) When Installing Lilo in MBR, it won't load. It actually shows nothing (so no "L" or "Li", etc visible on screen). Todays solution is Lilo installed in Superblock and booting via XP's NT-Bootloader. I think this has something to do with SATA, since its a sata-disk, also both linux partitions (root and swap) are in the extended part of the hd, no primary linux partition. I don't do this normally, but he requested it that way.

2) Booting the way it works today causes the system to hang on hotplug. Booting with nohotlug or disabling hotplug on boot works, but than he has to manually insert all needed modules for his devices. I can't find the module causing the hang. I also tried upgrading and downgrading on a different kernel, he uses test26.s from the install-dvd, but 2.6.17.13 has the same error, and 2.6.19 fails with a VFS-error, probably related to missing sata-drivers on boot, as I read today.

3) Because of having no hotplug-mechanism working, we are trying to find the pcmcia driver for the Ricoh bridges. I know they must be supported since 2.4.x, but I can't find the module. All I need would be the name of the module needed to load.

I appreciate any help I can get, hope this is enough information,

I dont know why it should hang at hotplug, but do you have udev installed ? udev is preferred over hotplug in newer kernels.

regards,
Hardik

i had probs with lilo in MBR on a friends laptop with SATA, but was too lazy to solve it. just installed grub and everything worked fine (installed in MBR)!
grub is available on the slackware cds/dvds.
for slackware 10.2 there was a package in extra or testing (i dont remenber)
for slackware 11.0 there is a slackbuild script (what is even better ...)
and you also have the analogon to liloconfig: called grubconfig

you tried the slackware-11.0-testing-kernel-2.6.18? i am happy with that one ;-)
but with all kernels i used in slackware pcmcia support worked out-of-the-box

I have not tried grub yet, but will probably do that in near future.
I never had any problems with lilo, except for that SATA-thing. Also pcmcia worked fine on my old laptop, now I've got an expresscard slot, don't know if that works under linux.
The problems on the Samsung X60 seem not to be Slackware-specific, since hardly any Live-CD works. The only one was Kanotix.
We'll try OpenSuse today, as he's not that familiar with linux. Will be interesting to compare those two.

But thanks anyway!