I don't think I want to go back to answering a questionair about the hardware to get to a kernel to support that hardware.

You know... not to be a jerk.. but you really ought to give the recent version a shot, this just isn't the case. It's not exactly totally automated but it isn't nearly as hard as people make it out to be.

What you need to know: How to make your own partitions. The install won't do this for you, a problem for beginners but hardly a big difference if you know how to use fdisk. Your sound card, this won't auto detect so yea.. I concede you will need to find out which module to use for sound.

What you don't need to know: How to compile a kernel. I wager most Slack users do anyway but there certainly is no need. Just did a fresh install the other day and was on the network/inet without any post install setup whatsoever. At this point I could have added a 'modprobe whatever' line and had sound. X11 doesn't configure for you but with the new version the xfree setup program probes my system just fine.

So yea.. setup isn't as easy as other distros, nor is it some great challenge. Slack doesn't work perfectly out of the box in all situations because thats a mess to script and you end up with a lot of fluff. But just for the record, no you don't need a huge list of information and weird voodoo knowledge to get it to run.