I am trying to install Slackware 15.0, and for some reason, parts of the package installation are going extremely slowly. It will blaze along through various packages and then suddenly hang for a long time (minutes-long) on a certain package, seemingly at random. After finally completing that, it will then hang again on some new package shortly thereafter.

I thought it might be my CD drive, so tried setting it to load the packages from the ISO on another HD partition instead. Still happened. I checked dmesg in another terminal and noticed error messages from dhcp, so unplugged my DSL modem in case it was a network thing. Restarted. No luck.

I looked at the results of top and it appeared that each time, it was hanging in the middle of a "tar" command.

I've installed many versions of Slackware before this and never had this happen. Any ideas?

I did verify the checksum on the ISO.

What are you writing to... could be a cache thing?

I'd be looking at the size of whatever it is hanging upon.

From memory the kernel, and firefox are two large files, and there will be others, which naturally take a while to unpack and install.

Other than that if it the install boots, I wouldn't be too concerned.

By the way, welcome to this forum.

There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to what it hangs on. Some are very small packages. One is dmidecode, for instance, which is all of 56k. (Which I certainly have no problem tar -xJfing from my old Slackware install...) And there are no error messages showing up in dmesg indicating disk problems, for instance. I'm not even sure if it's hanging up at all the same places each time. It's definitely not a normal thing. I've done many Slackware installs and never seen anything like this kind of ridiculous slowness.

I have yet to allow the install to run all (or even nearly all) the way through...have no idea how long it would take at this rate.

To answer Jan K, I'm installing to the fourth/last partition of a hard drive, a ~500G partition. I've never used this partition for anything before. (Had actually set it aside years ago for when I would finally want to upgrade.)

What cpu, memory, filesystem?

Is disc healthy?

Sounds like a hardware error. Perhaps try replacing cables? Clean plugs, sockets etc.

CPU is Intel Core i5-4660. 16gb memory. I'm installing onto an ext2 partition, which is kind of archaic, I know, but I can't see why it would cause any problems.

It's plausible that hardware could be going flaky given this is kind of an old computer, but I've been running Slackware 14.1 on this hardware and it's never made a peep about any kind of trouble, nor even showed signs of slowing down. And no messages are showing up in dmesg while the install is going on to indicate such a problem.

Is there anything I can do to get the install to give me more diagnostics, or something I can do in another console while it's running to figure out what's causing it to hang?

Are you sure you are installing the 64-bit version of Slackware?

Disk healthy?

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I'm installing 32-bit to avoid having trouble compiling old software...but would that really cause this kind of issue? I've been running Slackware 14.1 32-bit for years without problems.

That's just typical!

Never have had any problems and - bang! There's one!

Since my money is on the hardware...

First a disc health and test
- then replace/swap cables include a contact cleaning spray.

If no good, replace disc. Still no good, replace mb...

Happy Hunting!

Memory management of a 32-bit kernel is not the best for 16G memory.

When you boot the install image, in the 'boot:' prompt type 'hugesmp.s mem=3G'. Does it behave now?

It's probably a silly question, but when you set the partition aside, you did format it, didn't you?

My other question would be. Does the same thing happen when you try to upgrade 14.2?

Perhaps try installing 14.2 on this partition and then upgrade it.

Or you could try 'huge.s' instead. It does not use PAE.

Passing the mem=3G option fixed the problem completely! Thank you, Petri. And thank you everyone else for your thoughts and suggestions.

I actually only use 4G of memory on my old system (I compiled the kernel with highmem 4G but not 64G); I've never come close to needing more. I think that the original Slackware 14.1 install was set to use all 16G, though, and it installed and ran fine.