Anyone know how to access the BIOS on an old Dell? It's not setup to boot from the CD

try with F2... or look for your model on this page:

http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/bios_manufacturer.htm

OK, I just found out that my comp won't let me boot from a CD. So now how do I go about creating that boot disk?

ftp://slackware.oregonstate.edu/pub/...sks/README.TXT

ftp://slackware.oregonstate.edu/pub/...0.1/bootdisks/

That's not working for me. It says that it created the boot disk, but I can't see any files on the disk and when I put the disk in and boot with it, I keep getting, "Boot Failed".

You should be able to download an iso image of the disks that you will need.

Using Roxio from windows you double click on the iso file which should lunch Roxio and burn a boot cd disk of the distro you want. You will need to do this for each iso image that you need for a choosing flavor of linux.

I find it hard to believe that your Dell won’t let you set the bios to boot from the CD Rom, unless your computer is very old (Pre Pentium.) , In that case, your computer might run linux very slow or not at all (if you are not running a Pentium/Celeron or equ AMD class processor, I won’t even try running linux),

To change the bios settings, at the Dell screen when you first turn on the computer, it may ask “to enter setup press F2” or something like that. If it never ask then try F2, or Del, or F10 at the Dell screen. You can always do a google search.

I can get into the BIOS, but the only two options it has is Diskette First and Harddrive Only. It is a very old Dell. I might need to run it on a different computer. I have a different Dell. It's just as old and it doesn't have a NIC.

OK, I already have Windows XP running on my computer now. Can I start a dual boot with Linux now without having to reinstall Windows XP??

Once you get into linux, how do you start KDE?

You can start xserver by writing startx.
But what window manager it opens depends on what you have set as default.

yeah, if you set kde as the default window manager during the slackware installation it will be the one to get started when you startx...

you can always choose what window manager you wish to be used by doing a:and selecting the one you want to use before you do the startx...

BTW, if you want slackware to always boot into GUI mode instead of text mode just edit your /etc/inittab, by changing this line:
to thisthat tells slackware to boot into runlevel 4 instead of the (default) runlevel 3... the runlevel overview is in that same file also (/etc/inittab):
the file that gets run when you go into runlevel 4 is /etc/rc.d/rc.4 and if you take a look at that file you'll see that it tries to start several session managers... GDM, KDM, and XDM, in that order... so if you did a "full install" (recommended) then you'll have all three of those so it'll load gdm... to make it load kdm instead, you can comment the lines in /etc/rc.d/rc.4 that look for gdm so as that it will go for kdm right away, or you can uninstall gdm or you can make the gdm binary non-executable (chmod a-x /usr/bin/gdm), or you can edit the rc.4 script by moving the gdm part and placing it after the kdm one... personally, i'd probbaly just uninstall gdm (if i wasn't gonna use it anyways)...

Excellent, now I'm getting the hang of this.