HOWTO prevent installation hangs on recent hardware

The problem: The standard Slackware installer hangs solid when trying to install on recent hardware, shortly after loading the initrd.img. The only way out is to power down.

The reason: Some newer generation on-board graphics systems use 64-bit addressing for the efifb. Slackware uses elilo as the default boot system. Elilo is not compliant with 64-bit efifb.

The solution: Use GRUB to boot the install media.

Here's how:

1) Create usb install media using AlienBob's excellent usbimg2disk.sh script (can be found in the usb-and-pxe-installers folder of the slackware tree).

2) Mount the resulting USBSLACKINS media.

3) Delete contents of /EFI/BOOT/

4) Copy contents of /slackware64-current/EFI/BOOT to /EFI/BOOT/ omitting huge.s and initrd.img

5) Edit /EFI/BOOT/grub.cfg (change path to kernel and initrd):

Code:menuentry "Slackware 15.0 huge.s kernel"{
echo "Loading huge.s kernel and installer initrd. Please wait..."
linux /huge.s vga=normal load_ramdisk=1 prompt_ramdisk=0 ro printk.time=0 nomodeset SLACK_KERNEL=huge.s
initrd /initrd.img
}

menuentry "Slackware 15.0 huge.s kernel (use KMS console)"{
echo "Loading huge.s kernel (with KMS) and installer initrd. Please wait..."
linux /huge.s vga=normal load_ramdisk=1 prompt_ramdisk=0 ro printk.time=0 SLACK_KERNEL=huge.s
initrd /initrd.img
}You should now have a grub bootable install USBSLACKINS. Once the kernel and initrd have loaded, you should get the initial loading screen (the one with a row of penguins at the top), and be able to carry on with a normal Slackware install.

Its taken me a while to figure this out, as you cannot read any error messages before the system locks up solid! Hopefully this will help anyone else running into the same problem!

I initially worked around the problem by installing Liveslack first, and then using slackpkg+ to switch to Slackware. Strangely, going this route enabled the resulting Slackware install to boot with elilo, although the initial "penguin" screen was missing.

However, I would recommend switching to GRUB for anyone who is having this issue.

Hopefully Pat and/or Eric will address this before 15 gets released!

--
Pete