Well, I got slackware running. What a pain. When I first installed it, I had booted the slackware iso on a test VM that had previously been running centos. I told slackware to use the existing partitions, one of which was LVM. That's what caused the kernel panic, I think.

During the installation of slackware, you're dumped to the shell as root and told to create partitions. So this time, I ran parted to delete the existing partitons, and then ran cfdisk to create them as outlined in this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1uqxI6dVEE

Afterwards, you type 'setup' to do the install.

But it still wouldn't boot. This time it complained the super-block (I think it was) partition wasn't ext2. Sure enough, the installer defaults to ext4 and I had formatted with that. Slackware doesn't seem to be able to boot from anything but ext2.

So, I had to install again choosing an ext2 partition, and had it automatically install LILO to the MBR.

This time it booted and ran a filesystem check, then rebooted and came to a login prompt. I ran startx to get to the desktop.

I can't say it's very user-friendly. I'd love to know what they're going to use slackware for.

-----Original Message----- From: centos-virt-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-virt- bounces@centos.org] On Behalf Of John Maclean Sent: Saturday, July 24, 2010 9:27 AM To: Discussion about the virtualization on CentOS Subject: Re: [CentOS-virt] Can I install Slackware 13.1 as Xen-Guest?

Aint this a sign that the domU needs a cutomised initrd? mkinitrd --with blah --with-more-blah

Etc? John Maclean MSc (DIC) blackberry PIN 222C6738

On Jul 26, 2010, at 7:05 AM, Wendy William wrote:

No error message. The installation show Slackware boot: press ENTER or F2. But when I press ENTER or F2 then nothing happend.

I am using Slackware 13.1 32 bit.

I haven't done this since Slackware 11 for a client, but at the time the Slackware kernels didn't have the Xen guest extension. So I was never able to complete an emulated CD-based installation ... [1]

So, the last time I ran Slackware as a domu I think I ran pkgtool with a different target dest: to the domu disk mounted in the dom0. Like installing Debian/Ubuntu with debootstrap. And then I booted off a custom-built kernel located the host (no pygrub). ... except I can't remember how I would have gotten pkgtool on my non-Slackware dom0 ... it's also possible that I did such an installation on a loop-mounted disk image on a Slackware installation, and then copied that image over and dd-ed it to my domu's disk. (Even tarballing it over would work fine if you have the right options, though I suspect I went the dd route.)

YMMV since it's been years since I did this, it but could give you some other avenues to try besides CD-based install.

Eric

[1] I typically avoid emulated CD installs anyhow because they are tedious (hard to automate/script). I prefer some sort of installation from the host: debootstrap, Gentoo untar/chroot. I guess it breaks down with CentOS guests where I don't exactly do this: instead of using a CD, I boot to os/$arch/images/xen/{vmlinuz,initrd.img} with kickstart options. I think there was some tool more like debootstrap for this I looked at several years ago (called "rope"?) but it was unmaintained at the time.