Proprietary hardware w/ Slackware 10.1.0

Hi,

I'm trying to get a touchscreen working with a piece of hardware which essentially just a computer running Linux 2.6.17.1 and what seems to be a stripped down version of Slackware 10.1.0. I have a good idea of how to get the touchscreen working, but unfortunately some vital things like modprobe, installpkg etc are missing. Will I be able to download these commands and stick them in the appropriate directory to use them or is there more to it than that? If this will work is there any central location that these things can be downloaded from?

Thanks,

Mark

Welcome to the forums!

You may try your luck at The Slackware Linux Project. The download directories offer .iso files, but also the separate packages and source code of the latest but also a lot of older versions. Any of the 10 series should be available on most mirrors, but maybe not all. Shop around a bit and you will find it.

You can install everything manually, but it'll be an awful lot of work. Specially without `installpkg`, you can try to install that one first. Installpkg is actually a bash script, so it shouldn't give you too much problems I'd think, even if you turn up not to have a working build environment.

Download all packages you think you'll need, and a single `installpkg *tgz` in the download directory should take care of the install of all downloaded packages. I don't envy you, as you may have to track a lot of dependencies. A reinstall will be a lot faster, but that wasn't your question.

To do it manually:
Read this first, specially the part about the package series. I think you can easily install a whole package serie at once (disk space allowing), as the contents of series generally are related and contain many of the needed dependencies.
Description per package

EDIT: fixed link

Thanks for your comprehensive reply. I'll try installing some of the packages from the ftp site and see how I get on. I think I'll be fighting a losing battle, but doing these things always helps me understand Linux better so I'm sure something positive will come from it!

Mark