Beta 6 - Slackware 10.2 as a guest OS? Who did it?

Who has got Slackware 10.2 up and running as guest?
What settings did you choose?
What issues had you to work-around (if any)?

I tried, the installation went fine, except that I couldn't create a boot disk floppy image. I managed to mount a floppy image at that point but it concluded it couldn't format it. Are the floppy images read-only by nature?

Also, after complete installation, and reboot, the HD does not boot. It doesn't say it find no bootable partition, it just hang up on the POST screen where it would normally boot or offer the boot prompt.

Slackware / Parallels users: what might I have done wrong?

Thanks,

 

Lets keep this thread alive. Im working on this right now as well, but as i just purchased parallels and am a slackware noob, i dont expect to be the one to solve. I know people have pulled this off tho. SW deserves to be on the supported list of guest OS's.

 

i'm also having trouble w/ slackware

I had gotten trustix installed, but deleted because i didn't feel like re-learning a distribution and i was already familiar w/ slackware.

i also have the same issue re: floppys and having the system reboot. i'm hoping someone has had some success.

is there a list of supported Linux installs?

 

Slackware 10.2 working fine

I just installed Slack 10.2 from a DVD in Parallels (build 1862) a few days ago and have it running right now. No problems during install and so far everything works: network, X11, sound, etc. When I installed it I didn't do anything different than from what I normally do when installing it on my PC. I'm running Parallels on a Core Duo Mac Mini running 10.4.7. I also installed kernel 2.6.13 + modules and no problems running that either.

Slackware 10.2 should definitely be put on the list of supported Linux distributions. I have not had a single issue yet while running it. It's such a simple distro that there shouldn't really be any issues anyway.

Some things off the top of my head...

I didn't create a boot floppy during install. I would suggest skipping it. You don't really need a boot floppy for running it in Parallels.

If the hard drive won't boot then possibly something went wrong with the LILO installation during the install. I installed LILO on the MBR of my .hdd image. I also explicitly selected what to put in the lilo.conf file by picking my root partition (/dev/hda1) and telling LILO to not display a prompt and just boot straight to /dev/hda1. Did you maybe forget to select "Install LILO" from the LILO install menu? It's easy to accidentally skip it.

Also, when creating partitions in cfdisk or fdisk before running setup did you make sure to make your root partition Bootable?

You could always boot up the install disc and try to fix the install:

Once you've gotten to a prompt as root. run fdisk or cfdisk to make sure your partitions are there and that the root partition has the bootable flag set. if your partitions are OK then it might be a LILO issue. Mount your root partition somewhere (/mnt/hd would work), cd to wherever you mounted it, run chroot /mnt/hd (or whatever your current dir is), bring up /etc/lilo.conf in vi and double check it, then run lilo to reinstall LILO (preferrably on the MBR if you're only installing Slackware by itself on this one .hdd image). Then eject install disc and reboot.

I've done that before to fix problematic Slack installations. That's about all I can think of at the moment.

 

I was able to get Slackware 10.2 installed without any problems, but I am having problems getting X to start. jms71, could you perhaps share some of the contents from your xorg.conf, notably what device to use for the mouse?

EDIT: Well, that's what I get for trying to customize things. The default install works just fine!

EDITx2: Alright, so X will now start and I can get KDE up and running. However, the screen resize and rotate tool won't load for some reason. So I'm getting something around a 1600x1200 resolution on my MacBook, which is far too big and makes it almost unuseable. Any ideas as to what's going on here?

EDITx3: Found some solutions:

First, I used "X -configure" to generate an xorg.conf file (the default install appears to simply generate one on the fly instead of writing one to hard disk). As expected, it spat an error that the mouse couldn't be detected, but I discovered how the default installation used the mouse. In the Mouse section of xorg.conf, where you have something such as:

Option "Device" "/dev/mouse"

I changed this to:

Option "Module" "/usr/X11R6/lib/modules/input/mouse_drv.o"

(This might be better done in the module section? I haven't tried that yet, but this seems to work.)

To fix the resolution problems, under the Monitor section the following were added (taken from a tutorial on getting Ubuntu to work with BootCamp):

Option "DPMS"
HorizSync 28-64
VertRefresh 43-60
Modeline "1280x800" 83.91 1280 1312 1624 1656 800 816 824 841 +HSync +Vsync

And under the "Screen" section added:

Modes "1280x800"

to every Display subsection.

After making those changes, I was able to start X, with almost complete mouse support (no scrolling), and successfully used KDE and fluxbox. If anyone sees some better ways to configure this, please feel free to share. I'll also come back here if I find anything else that might be helpful.

 

I've got Slackware 11 up and running in Parallels but I can't get any sound. Do you have any clues for me?

When I run "play" from the command line, passing both mp3 and wav files, there is no error, and the feedback at the prompt indicates they are playing, but I hear nothing. noatun also indicates it's playing.

 

Did you unmute it? The sound is initially muted, run "alsamixer" and unmute Master and PCF (hit the m key) and then turn them up (up/down arrows). Then do "alsactl store" to save the mixer settings.

 

I finally get that hint in the Slackware forums. That solved it for root. I also had to add the user to the audio group. Sound works, though the KDE games I've tried still don't have sounds, but I don't use the games generally anyway.

thanks.