Hi,
I want to switch from my windows xp computer from Slackware Linux for my home pc.I use world and excel software and videos as well to watch movies. Kindly guide me that if I use slackware how can I open my Ms office files in it?

2- Does Slackware support yahoo messenger with voice ?

3- What is the system requirement for slackware,the Ram,Processor and hard disk space for its latest version?

Though there are multiple queries but I hope that for a new user you will guide me so I keep my windows in trash.

thanks in advance.
garden

MS office files are handled by Open Office. The compatibility is very close to 100% these days.

MS-Messanger. See this link.-->http://linux.softpedia.com/get/Commu...senger-2.shtml

There are linux apps that do the same thing.

See this link for minimum specs. -->http://www.slackware.org/install/sysreq.php

Now with your questions answered, have you any linux experience? If not, I would suggest you download a live CD first, and do some work with a live CD. They do not install to your HD, you run them in ram. This will give you some hands on first.

You can open up your MS files, use linux programs etc. Try Knoppix. It has a ton of apps installed, and will boot on almost any system with a CD drive.

As for Slackware, it is not a distro for beginners. You will have to learn how to edit files to configure hardware. There is a section on this board for Slackware. Do some reading there before you try to install.

You may want to try a more noob friendly distro first. There are several, Ubuntu, Mandriva, Fedora just to mention three, there are more. These distros have tools built in to aid a beginner configure hardware and get you running.

If you decide to go ahead with Slack, be prepared for a long learning curve. Its a great distro, rock solid.

1. Depends. You can install Open Office or Libre Office, and Abiword in Windows to see if these applications are able to open your MS Office files. Those 3 programs are the most common and popular Office apps for Linux. You may also want to try Google Docs.

2. There are numoures IM clients for Linux. Some support Voice/WebCam features, some do not. I personally do not use Yahoo. We use GTalk (Google's IM). Web/Voice works with this. For Yahoo there is GYachI which does support Voice and WebCam features.

3. The specs are quite low. More is always better. I have a PII 450 with 256MiB ram. Slackware runs well with this PC. You should only expect basic operations from an old PC such as this. A PIII class CPU with 512MiB Ram, and ~10GiB hard drive will give a great experience.
Here's the listed requirements. http://www.slackware.com/install/sysreq.php

You would install OpenOffice.org. You get it from SlackBuilds.org (http://slackbuilds.org/repository/13...openoffice.org). That is a Slackware package that you install with the standard Slackware installpkg utility.

Movies, movies and stuff are supported by a number of utilities that are standard equipment; MPlayer is one, there are others.
Dunno -- probably, but I do not know for sure.
You ought to have at least a Pentium processor, 1G or more RAM (on what is probably your 32-bit system, up to 4G), and a reasonable hard disk, say, 50G or better (you don't need 50G to install, but you will want some storage space for you stuff).
That's what LQ is here for; welcome.

Moving from any Windows version to Linux is relatively easy; to be sure, there are differences and you will need to be patient with yourself as you go along. Bear in mind that you will suddenly have a large number of choices about what to use to accomplish a given task (and there will be a learning curve!). Read documentation, take your time, don't try to do everything at once and don't panic. Be sure to copy all the Windows stuff you care about (files, not software) onto some sort of backup media so you can copy it onto your new Slackware system because when you do the installation, you're going to reformat your disk drive and Windows will be gone completely and forever.

Hope this helps some.

With the default Slackware full installation, Kword (Word) and Kspread (Excel) do an OK job. For best results you will need to install OpenOffice or LibreOffice. There are packages available for both. LibreOffice is still in testing but I looks real promising as a complete and better replacement for OpenOffice.

The default Slackware install comes with Kopete and Pidgin both of these support Yahoo! Messenger. I am not sure about Pidgen but Kopete does support both voice and web cam with Yahoo Messenger.

If you are running XP on this computer then Slackware should run just fine with the current processor, RAM; perhaps even better.

Disk space? Well I am fairly certain your hard drive has more than enough space for Slackware. A standard Full Installation of Slackware it self takes less than 6G. I'd give it at least 20G of disk space. Unless you are switching over and then give it all the hard drive. Setup a root '/' partition and an home '/home' partition. Give the root about 10-12G and the rest to /home.

Thanks a lot for your replies.well i have work on red hat distribution like red hat 9 and have intermidiate experience using terminal for configuring system.For yahoo messenger with voice kindly guide me the exact softare.
I am happy that in linux there is no tention about viruses like windos xp.
For a home pc can i make my hard disk configuration as for slack
/boot =250 MB
/root =6 GB
/swap partition=Double of ram
/var =4 GB
/usr =4 GB
/home = rest of the hard disk space.

Please guide me regarding to slackware.thanks

You can try LibreOffice or the others mentioned above, but if they don't do the job as well as you would like, you can run ms-office in Linux using WINE. I have the full ms-office suite running in Slackware using WINE, but only use it when LibreOffice can't do the job and that isn't very often.

If you like to view Powerpoint Presentations as they were originally written, you will need to run PowerPoint or the Powerpoint Viewer (the viewer, alone, is available from ms for free) in WINE.

Alien Bob's WINE package is built specifically for Slackware and is available at,
http://connie.slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/

If you are not at the point where you feel confident enough to install and setup WINE there is a commercial product based on WINE, called "CrossOver Linux" that will walk you through its installation. A free trial version is available. http://www.codeweavers.com/products/

VLC is, IMHO, the best media player available, but there are many other out there. It not only plays videos, but audio files as well. http://www.videolan.org

If you are running KDE as your desktop in Slackware, Kaffeine does a very good job of playing DVDs.
http://kaffeine.kde.org/

Amarok is a powerful audio player and is part of the KDE installation.

Doh! Wish I'd seen this about 4 hours earlier. I just installed OpenOffice by converting all the RPMs to TGZs and installing each TGZ package manually.

For the threadstarter: Slackware is great. I've installed and started using RedHat, Ubuntu, and FreeBSD, then quickly abandoned them as they weren't exactly what I was looking for. Slackware installed quickly/correctly, and runs/looks just as I wanted.

Do yourself a favor and when you choose an XWindows thingy, use Gnome, not KDE. I went with KDE4 and was pretty disappointed with it, then recently installed Gnome as a replacement.

Also, use wicd to manage your wireless connections.... couldn't get my wireless to work at all with the built-in wireless stuff, but wicd, configured through XWindows connected right away.

You'll love Slack.

Please stop spreading FUD.

2 members found this post helpful.

I would not recommend to put /usr and /var on different partitions and give / 6GB. For /boot, there are 50MB sufficient, but Slackware doesn't come with a separate /boot partition by default (which means, I never used one )
The amount of Swap should depend on the amount of your Ram. If you don't have a laptop, i.e. you don't want to hibernate, I'd recommend a maximum of 256MB of Ram.
A Slackware full-install, including KDE, takes about 5GB of space on the HD.
So I would create a / partition of about 14GB, 256MB for swap and the rest for /home.

Markus

See my post above. Kopete, the KDE Instant Messenger. It is included with Slackware.

Unless you have a specific reason for using a separate /boot/ partition I wouldn't bother with one. They are not really needed anymore.

4G is not enough for /usr/ on a stock Slackware install. You also need to allow for installation of non-Slackware applications. On my main machine /usr/ totals 6.5G. My daughter's laptop /usr/ partition takes up 4.7G.

Depending on the amount of RAM you have, making swap double in size could be a lot of waisted space. I have 4G in install RAM and I have 1G swap partition, that is rarely used.

On a home system all you really need is / and /home/.

thanks every one for your superb support and guidance. Well as "cwizardone" sated
You can try LibreOffice or the others mentioned above, but if they don't do the
job as well as you would like, you can run ms-office in Linux using WINE.

So it means if I install WINE then it can also support yahoo messenger for windows under Linux ?

Doesn't look good for Yahoo Messenger in Wine.

WineHQ - Yahoo! Messenger

No, not all windows applications will run in WINE. Some do, some don't. There are lists of programs known to run under WINE and those that will not run under WINE available at both WINEHQ and at site for CrossOver Linux. You can also try yourself to see if a particular application will work in WINE.

As previous mentioned Kopete, the instant messenger for KDE, can run both audio and video from you yahoo messenger contacts.

If you absolutely have to run a ms-windows based application and can't find a Linux equivalent, you can run, e.g., XP in virtual machine on your Linux Desktop. I run XP in VirtualBox to run a scanner as the windows software does a better job than the Linux software, Xsane. Your scanner might run just fine with Xsane, but mine does not.

I would not bother with WINE; if you really, really have to run Windows stuff, get, say, VirtualBox (it works just fine) and install XP in a virtual machine -- don't forget, though, that you'll always have the joy of dealing with constant "critical" updates and other Wonderful Windows... uh, features. If you need to work with Office produce, OpenOffice.org will handle pretty much anything they can throw at you.

About disk partitioning, I've been partitioning disk drives pretty much like this for years
The root partition includes /usr and, with a full install of Slackware 13.1, is at 5.9G (or 68%) used. /usr/local (which is where I put anything that is not part of the Slackware distribution, things like source code, additional packages and the like). /opt is where "optional" software goes; e.g., OpenOffice.org, Adobe stuff, GoogleEarth (it's where they want to install by default). /var/lib/virtual is where I put virtual machines (rather than in the default your home directory). /home is... well, where users live and /spares is where large stuff goes; e.g., photographs, videos, goop and goodies that I don't want in home directories that will be shared among users (I do a lot of geographic information, there are a lot of quite large data files and /spares is where that stuff lives).

I do two partitions that get mounted in /var/lib simply because I do a lot of data base work, MySQL (at least in Slackware) wants to be in /var/lib/mysql and I don't want to fool with it, so I just follow that. I do the same thing with /var/lib/virtual for no particularly good reason other than following /var/lib/mysql (it could be anywhere, doesn't matter, that's just where I stick it).

And, here's the trick. Once Slackware is installed with the above partitioning scheme, I can install a new release completely without destroying my local stuff (I simply "mount" but do not format /usr/local, /opt, /home or /spares as I go through the setup). "Mount" means add the partition so it gets added to /etc/fstab, but do not format it.

Hope this helps some.