Re: Linux and the 701

[Sridhar Ramaswamy <sr@cs.brown.edu>]

I struggled with this problem for a long, long time.
First off, make absolutely sure that your disk directories
contain exactly the right files. I had a problem
because the mirror site that I got my files from
stupidly compressed *all* files, including the
"maketag", "tagfile.org", etc. The slakware setup
program doesn't like these files being compressed.

Secondly, make absolutely sure that the files that you
have are correct. I would suggest running "cksum" over
the files and comparing with the CHECKSUM file that
comes with the slackware distribution. 

For more than two days, I had this mysterious problem
where I would mount an external hard disk to a linux
machine, copy the alskware over to it, and then
try to use this disk to install on my thinkpad. But
the installation would fail in weird and sickening ways.
It turned out that there was bug in the linux machine
I was using. Because of some problem in the file system/
networking code in 1.1.55, the binary files that I 
ftp'ed over would be different from the original ones.
(I checked this by ftp'ing the file to the linux machine,
and then ftp'ing it back to my sparc and doing a binary
diff on the file.)

Hope this helps. Once I had the slakware source properly
set up, everything else was a dream.

--Sridhar