Linux Configuration and Installation:Installing Linux

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What to Do if Things Go Wrong

For the most part, installation of Linux from the accompanying CD-ROMs is a pretty straightforward proposition, and you shouldn’t have many problems. However, there may be some cases when you run into problems when you reboot the Linux system after installation. These problems may include:

• You’re told that the system is out of memory. You’ll probably run into this problem if you’re operating with 4 megabytes of RAM or less.

• Your system hangs when you first run Linux. In these situations, you’ll want to watch the screen closely for error messages. Sometimes Linux will be seeking a device at a specific address (say, a CD-ROM drive) and instead find a network card. In these situations, Linux will hang. You’ll need to tell Linux to look for the device at the address on your system, which requires that you send an option line to Linux upon bootup. This is a situation that’s covered in the many documents included on the CD-ROMs.

Other Configuration Procedures

Now that you’ve got Linux basically installed and running, you can take the time to set up some system peripherals. These include printers, sound cards, and (for laptop users) PCMCIA devices.

Setting Up a Printer

When you installed Slackware, you were asked about the location of your printer. This information was translated into the UNIX equivalent; a printer on the first parallel port is assigned a device name of /dev/lp0. Similarly, if you’re using a serial printer (which, thank goodness, are getting rarer and rarer), it will probably be assigned a device name of /dev/ttyS1.

This simple configuration means that you can immediately print ASCII characters, with the Linux system treating your printer like a simple line printer. Printing is actually a more involved process than you might think. We’ll cover printing in Chapter 4, but you should be aware right now that printing in Linux involves the following steps:

• When your computer boots, the lpd daemon runs, looking at the /etc/printcap to see what printer you’re using; the process continues to run throughout your Linux computing session.

• When you print a document with lpr, the lpd command actually handles the print job.

• To change anything in the printing process (like when you want to kill or suspend print jobs), the lpc and lprm commands are used to talk with the lpd daemon.

Obviously, you’ll want to make sure that /etc/printcap contains correct information about your printer. When you look at it in a text editor like elvis or emacs, you’ll see that all the lines are commented out with # characters. Most popular printers are listed in this file (such as HP LaserJets), and if you uncomment out the lines specific to your printer, you should be able to use it.

It’s important to get this information correct, because Linux printers that aren’t configured properly have a tendency to suffer from the “staircase effect,” where lines are staggered at the beginning:


We hate the staircase effect.

          It makes our documents look really stupid.

               And it makes it hard for us to do our work properly.

                    In fact, we find that we don't print things out

when our printer is misconfigured.

More information about printing in Linux can be found on the first CD-ROM, in the PRINTING-HOWTO.

Setting Up a Sound Card

As installed, Slackware includes no support for the sound component of sound boards. Yet many of you installed kernels that supported sound boards, like the sbpcd kernel used for systems with a CD-ROM attached to the sound board. What gives?

When you install one of these kernels, you’re actually making sure that the CD-ROM attached to the sound board will work, not the sound board itself. To actually use one of these sound boards, you’ll need to recompile a kernel that supports a sound board.

Why would you do this? Well, maybe you’re a dedicated Internet surfer and you want to be able to use the RealAudio streaming-audio player on your machine (yes, there is a Linux version; check out http://www.realaudio.com). Or maybe you’re a dedicated gamesperson and you want to experience the audio gore of DOOM. Or maybe you want to play musical CDs using some of the tools we discuss in Chapter 4.

To add sound support, you’ll want to recompile a Linux kernel specific to your needs, a process we explained earlier in the section entitled “Recompiling a Kernel.” In step 2 of that process, you’ll be asked to specify components that you’ll need. There will be a line in that process requiring a positive response from you:


     Sound card support (CONFIG_SOUND) [M/n/y/?]

You’ll answer y (for yes).

After that process is completed, another configuration script will be run, going through a list of sound cards and asking you to specify your sound card. The questions are very specific; you’ll be asked about every sound board listed in Chapter 1, so be patient and wait for your sound board to be listed.

WARNING: Be careful about sound cards that are advertised as being “compatible” with popular sound cards, such as the SoundBlaster from Creative Labs. Compatibility can mean two different things: One level of compatibility means that the hardware is exactly the same as a popular model, while the other means that a computer can be tricked, usually with special drivers, to think that it’s using a clone instead of the popular model. In the second case, these special drivers run under DOS or Windows and will be worthless under Linux.

After saying yes to a specific sound card, you may be asked about your sound card and where it’s actually found on the computer system, meaning the I/O address, IRQ, and DMA. (If you don’t know this, you better start reading the documentation.) You may also be asked to supply a file used to initialize the card; this information will be incorporated into the kernel. These files should be found on installation diskettes that ship with your sound card.

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