I'm having trouble booting Slackware 12 from GRUB

I did a successful install of Slackware 12 on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), and my two problems are configuring X (I can't get enough colors ... I think I'm stuck at 16 colors -- aka 4-bit color) and getting GRUB to boot it.

I know that Slack will boot because I did the original install with LILO (as usual LILO didn't pick up any of my other Linuxes) and ran Slackware for a day. Man is it nice, the X problems notwithstanding. It's the fastest KDE distro I've ever tried and makes KDE a viable alternative on my desktop. And I love a distro that automatically includes Xfce and Fluxbox as alternate window managers ... AND I like booting into a console and typing startx to go into the GUI (along with Slackware's easy-as-pie xwmconfig command-line utility to switch window managers).

But I can't get GRUB to boot Slack, no matter how hard I try (OK ... I can only try so hard because I don't have that many skills).

I don't have the laptop with me at the moment, but I found this page, which has some tips for Slackware booting in GRUB. The best is the "chainloader" method, putting Slack's LILO on its own partition and then chainloading to it to boot Slackware. I have a feeling that is going to work for me.

The author of the Just Linux entry goes by the name of Saikee and calls him (or her) self "A chainloader +1 believer."

I'm happy enough to discover Just Linux -- looks like a good place to find the info you need to make Linux work for you.

I haven't been keeping up with the Slackware security patches on the one Slack install I do have. That's because a) I'm lazy and b) I'm using that box for the Thin Puppy Torture Test II and don't have a hard drive connected (the test is being conducted with a CD-ROM drive for booting and an USB flash drive for storage). One of Slackware's greatest strengths (and weaknesses, depending on how you look at it) is that security patches must be downloaded and applied individually with the upgradepkg utility. I'm sure this can be automated with Kpackage or gslapt, but that's beyond my current capability (and my short foray with Kpackage in Debian left me less than a believer; I'll stick to Synaptic for the time being).

I still have X to deal with (I tried a bunch of xorg.conf versions and tweaks, none of them doing exactly what I want/need) but booting from GRUB into Slackware is hopefully just a little bit closer to reality.

Note: X in Slackware 12 set up really well on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt), and I only needed to tweak the number of colors to make it work). The problem is that I only have a 3 GB hard drive on that laptop, and the full Slackware 12 install is 4 GB+. So I opted not to install anything even remotely connected to KDE and ended up with no office suite and very little free disk space anyway. I wiped the drive and returned to Debian with Xfce, which gives me OpenOffice (which runs surprisingly well on a 233 MHz CPU) and almost twice the free disk space. And it's just so much easier to run apt or Aptitude for updates and adding software. And I didn't mention that learning to use Aptitude (Debian's catch-all command-line package manager) is something I've been meaning to do.

But Debian didn't find my sound card on the $15 Laptop. Gotta figure that one out. I'm using DSL 4.0 and Puppy 3.01 from live CDs as alternate distros for the Compaq, so I'll be evaluating what works better for the hardware and the things I want the computer to do.

Final Slackware-and-X note: I was able to boot Wolvix Hunter from GRUB, and it has perfect screen resolution, too, so maybe I'll boot it again and peek in on the xorg.conf to get Slackware 12 looking as it should.