hi guys. i just got my inspiron 6400 today and plan to dual boot it with win xp and possibly slackware( or any other distro is okay for me too). Anyway, my own desktop is running dual boot too and i think i shouldnt have problem with this laptop as well but i saw that Dell reserved few GBs of hdd space for their stuff. can i just go delete this partition? or should i refer this question to Dell customer support instead? thanks guys!

A few notes from installing Slackware 10.2 on an Inspiron 6000, dual booting with XP.

• The sata.i kernel is 2.4.x and your disk I/O will be really, really, really slow -- use the test26.s kernel for installation and, after initial reboot, upgradepkg *.tgz in the linux-2.6.13 directory on disk 2 (installpkg kernel-headers*.tgz).
• The display will be big-gunky and there's nothing you can do about that until you upgrade to Slackware 11.0 -- the drivers just aren't there for the Intel graphics hardware in 10.2. I fooled around with replacing X11 with the new version but too many other things just don't want to work with that; e.g., ImageMagick, some of the KDE information displays; nothing major, just that some X-library-related things won't work but the display will look nice.

I'm waiting for my subscription shipment for 11.0, so I can't tell you about it -- 10.2 works fine (except for the display being gunky) and when 11.0 comes I'll upgrade to that.

I'd be inclined to leave the Dell stuff alone -- you may need to recover XP and it'll be a whole lot easier if the Dell stuff is there than reinstalling XP from the CD's and then reinstalling all the Microsoft patches (well, you'd still have to redo the patches,but that will never end).

Other than the above, the thing works just fine.

Best of luck with it.

very well. im waiting for 11 to come out as well. anyway, i forgot to mention that my inspiron 6400 comes with core 2 duo(merom) processor. does this make any differences with core duo(yonah) itself?