I've been wanting to dual boot XP and Slack on my Inspiron 8200 for a while. My only concern is, that I operate out of this machine at work, so if it goes down, I go down. My plan would be to have the 2nd HD be partitioned and have Slack on the new partition.

I would want Linux to access my Linksys 802.11g wireless NIC card.

Is this a risky propsal? I don't really want to make a project of installing Slack, I just want to use it. Is it going to take a ton of time to get it to run correctly?

Anyone know if the Slackware install HOW TO for the 8500 would hold pretty true to my 8200? Thanks for the help!!

Look at the LQ HCL for more info. This might help: http://jimbomania.com/laptop.html. Some other sources might be tuxmobil.org and linux-on-laptops.com

Overall., slack should install fine.

I've been running Slack on my Inspiron 8200 for over a year and have had no problems with it. You may also want to check out www.linux-on-laptops.com for some other people's experience with the Inspiron 8200. It definitely helped me get a good idea about any possible pitfalls with the hardware.

Tino27, did you manage to get the exended desktop working with your graphics card? Mine is nVidia geforce 440 go and i just didn't find a solution for it running SuSE 9.1. I'd like to give Slackware a go on my inspiron but would greatly appreciate any info concerning configuring some gizmos and also the power management and alikes.

I haven't got to far with it. I got KDE to work perfect. I got Lilo to work. Everything works except my wireless NIC card. There's a 30 post thread here of people trying to help me get my NIC card to work, but it doesn't seem to work.

Good Luck!

OceanSurf -- extended desktop? Not sure what you mean by this.

I had no problem with Ubuntu, it got everything installed except for the sound card (for which i don't really care), and my wireless card, but just because it didn't had a native linux wireless driver.

Anyway making it work with ndiswrapper (and makign ndiswrapper work) was fairly easy, I had been struggling with Fedora Core 3 for 5 days until I decided to change to Ubunutu and got it all working in 3-4 hours.

He means that option in KDE that allows you to have a desktop larger than the actuall visible screen space. You navigate the desktop by putting your mouse on the edge of the screen and the desktop scrolls. Think like in Mario for nintendo (=

Tino27.

At the moment I'm using winblows on my Dell and have an external LCD display hooked in the VGA jack in the back. And you could say I have a resolution of 2880x1200/1024. you know what I mean? SuSE has some modules in the YaST but it was no help. When I booted the machine with the external display, X wouldn't start because it didn't know what mode to use :/. Anyway, I was just wondering if anyone got it working. I read Gentoo users managed to mirror the picture onto the external display but not extend the work area.