After connecting everything up to the target machine and putting the zip disk in place I boot the machine with the appropriate boot disk. Before logging in it is a good idea to use the scroll back feature built into Linux and check to see all your hardware was detected properly. To do this hold the shift key and use the page up and page down keys as appropriate. Getting a login prompt at all usually means the boot time errors were not too bad.
Slackware will present some instructions. Please read them Carefully. Login as root and fdisk root and swap partitions on the target drive if needed. Reboot the machine if you ran fdisk and Carefully reread the instructions on the screen if there are any, then login as root.
Even on machines with only 4 megs. of ram you will not need to create a swap partition until prompted to do so in the setup program. We already have swap running on the zip disk. Run the Slackware setup program:
CAREFULLY read and follow the instructions the menus provide. The first thing setup will want to do is create and initialize your swap partition on your hard drive this is ok despite the dire warnings and will not affect the swap file on the zip drive.setup
You do not want to allow /dev/sda4 to be automatically mounted and when questions come up about this in the menus. Do not add it unless this zip drive is dedicated to the target machine full time.
When you get the menu that asks where the source of the installation media is select item number 4. "Install from a premounted directory". The next screen will ask for its name, it is /slakware.
I recommend installing only the "a" disk set at this time. It will crash the install if the person selecting packages gets greedy and fills the disk before lilo is written and the kernel is installed. During basic install I install the kernel from the boot disk only. There are relatively few choices to be made from here and the Slackware documentation from the cdrom or your ftp site will do you much better than I can from here.
Leave the zip drive and disk in place after the initial install is complete. Remove the floppy when prompted to do so and reboot. If all is right in the world Bill, er, your friend/customer will have a working Linux system come up.
After rebooting the system login as root and mount the zip disk again:
Check available drive space:mount /dev/sda4 /mnt
Run setup again from your new system:df
Choose "s" SOURCE from the menu and press the enter key. Select item number 4. "Install from a premounted directory" and press the enter key again.setup
Enter the directory name. This time use:
Choose the packages you want or need. All are available except those which start with "x". When you're finished installing packages from this disk exit setup and run:/mnt/slakware
umount /dev/sda4
You may now remove the disk and if X will be installed insert the 2nd zip disk and work through setup again this time only packages beginning with X will be available. If you will be installing a custom kernel from the prebuilt kernels you may also do this while the 2nd. zip disk is installed.
Some times I have trouble with the links for the libraries either on the root zip disk or on the final destination machine. There are two possible fixes for this.
Fix 1) If the system boots to a command prompt and you can login as root in single user mode try the command:
If things are not broken so badly that this command will not run then reboot and watch for library related errors. If there are none your in business.ldconfig
Fix 2) If ldconfig can not repair things you will need to re master the root floppy disk and recopy the files from it as in instruction 8) through 12) or reinstall Linux to the destination system as appropriate.