i just got a laptop, and i am trying to set up slackware with it... i have never had a laptop before, and i was wondering if there is anything i should know when i set everything up... i some questions tho

how do i change the resolution??

how do i make the icons not show up wiht i run something?

how do you think i should partition it?? it is 15gig, and i need dual boot... this is wha ti was thinking

5gig win
5gig /
1gig swap
4gig ext2 to sharebetween os'


any other suggestions?

For one, you won't be able to use ext2 to share between Os. It would have to be FAT32 or VFAT.

Second, you are not going to need 1 gig swap.

I would do it like this

hda1= 5 gig windows
hda2= 5 gig slack (i recommend reiserfs)
hda3= 4.5 gig to share (FAT32)
hda4= 512 swap

Resolution is changed within /etc/X11/XF86Config

There's a section with default display color depth, and the different resolutions for each depth.
Simply put your preferred first.

--Shade

You can set this by editing /etc/X11/XF86Config or, if you're using the framebuffer, by editing /etc/lilo.conf. Either way, you'll want to read through /etc/X11/XF86Config for more info.
This depends on what window manager / desktop environment you run. Personally, I use fluxbox and have never had to worry about icons :-)
First off, I assume you meant that the last partition is FAT32 since windows won't see ext2. With that in mind, I'd shrink the win partition and add that to the shared partition, since windows doesn't really care on which partition your data (or your progams for that matter) reside. The best way to decide how big your win partition should be is to start by installing windows and some of the larger applications (Office, Photoshop, whatever) that you'll be using, then see how much disk space it uses. Then wipe the drive and repartition, rounding up the win partition to the nearest gig or so.

Of course if your windows install is on FAT instead of NTFS, then I'd suggest eliminating the shared partition and splitting that space among your win and root partitions.

The swap size depends on how much memory you have, but it's safe to say that it'll probably never need a gig. The general rule of thumb is to set up twice your physical memory for swap, but if you have more than 256M of memory you can cap the swap at 512M.

Enjoy!
--- Cerbere

Much better explanation than my simple outline

Cheers, Cerbere!

--Shade

As for the desktop icons, most window managers don't even have them, so (as suggested), you can just use fluxbox or XFce or something. In GNOME, you can open the configuration editor (GConf editor, not the GNOME Control Center) and set Nautilus to not display a desktop. I don't know how or if this is possible in KDE, but everybody keeps telling me how configurable KDE is so I suppose there must be a setting somewhere to turn off the desktop icons.