Once your disk is partitioned, you’re ready to start the Slackware
installer. This is a simple menu-based script based on dialog for
the TUI display. Hope you like blue and teal! Start it with:
Then I let it guide me through the installation steps starting with setting
up the swap space.
The rest of this is in no particular order:
As mentioned, the installer will detect your partitions and offer to format
them for you. The ext4 filesystem (default) is the “no regrets” option.
The btrfs option will give you all sorts of cool features, but then people
on the Internet will yell at you and make you sad.
As mentioned, I have it mount root / and /home to separate partitions,
but this is totally optional. And of course you can have more partitions
than that.
The network setup is really simple for hard-wired machines.
You can setup WiFi after installation with NetworkManager.
In fact, these days, I choose the NetworkManager, even if the machine doesn’t have WiFi.
Slackware should also detect your EFI partition and offer to format it.
Later, it will ask if you would like to use ELILO and add Slackware
as an EFI boot option. I go with these. People on the Internet
will yell at you for not using Grub, but ELILO works just fine like
LILO did before it, so I’ll wait until it doesn’t.
Running Slackware means you are in charge.
(By the way, if you have brief instructions for installing Slackware with Grub
as the bootloader, I’d love to include or link to them here!)
Always do a full install of the packages (this is the default).
Slackware is a complete system and it assumes that you have installed
everything. The package-making scripts at https://slackbuilds.org/ and
all forum help, etc. will assume you have installed everything.
Slackware is a true general-purpose desktop operating system.
(Of course, you can, and I have, made minimal installs of Slackware for
constrained storage setups. But know that you may have some challenges.)
On the window manager/desktop environment selection, I always pick “xfce”. I’m
a big fan of xfce and related tools. (While I’m giving out accolades, I’m also
a huge fan of the KDE “k”-prefixed software like kstars and ktuberling (the
potato editor!) and especially Krita!) I always switch over to dwm, the
tiling window manager, once everything’s working. But xfce gives me a great
initial X11 test.
At the end of the installation, you can remove the USB installer drive
(when instructed) and reboot.