The Master Boot Record is where the system reads at power-on, that means in most cases /dev/hda1. The superblock is the primary part of each partition.
So you could install your linux in, let's say /dev/hda6 which is the first logical partition in your extended partition. The MBR is still /dev/hda1, but the superblock is in /dev/hda6 in this case.

You can install the bootloader in both. I decided to install LILO as bootloader in superblock and to use another bootloader in MBR (i use xfdisk, which I can start off a windows boot disk in emergency). When the system is powered on, my first bootloader xfdisk is read from MBR and I get a menu. If I chose Windows, this one is booted from /dev/hda1, if I choose Slackware, Lilo in superblock of /dev/hda6 is started and loads Slackware from /dev/hda6.

I can not say if Lilo works for me in MBR, I never tried this (works well for many others). I decided to use xfdisk for to be able to start with a windows rescue diskette.

Download now. Buy now. When the box come in the mail, you will already be set. Don't bother unwrapping it, just save it. D/L all the disks if you like, but 1 & 2 will get you going. The other two have extras and source. They are all on the official mirrors. You won't want all the extras. You (probably) won't the source right away (if ever).

Where to install LILO? You could do what I did. Just use a floppy to boot Slackware. Wait until you get tired of that. Then, install to the MBR to see if that works. It will. Or, just skip ahead and install to the MBR right away.

You're being cautious. That's always nice. I was, too. Just go for it. D/L the first two CDs and get going. You seem to already know quite a bit about computers, so you will rpobably be surprised at how smooth everything goes.

Using root only is a bad idea. People will say that all then time. Others use root exclusively and wionder what all the fuss is about. I look everything as a learning experience. You may be the only user now, but what about in the future? If you run as a user, you will learn the ins and outs of running as a user. Adding other users will become trivial.

I hope you do well with your attempt at Linux in general and Slackware specifically. Before you ask any more questions though, I would urge you to read through the Slackware book. Although you will always find people willing to offer you assistance on this forum, part of becoming a real Slackware user is developing your own abilities. I would always spend some time trying to find any answer on my own before asking someone else. Several things might result. You might find the answer on your own, along with an understanding of the concept and not just knowing the answer. You will learn where to look for answers and how. You may find out that you already knew the answer, just not how to apply it in linux terms.You may not find the answer but will understand enough to ask the question intelligently. It may also help you to separate the really stupid answers that you will inevitably get on here from the ones that will really help. There are a couple of really sharp guys (not me) on this board that will help you if you need it, But they are not likely to respond unless your qestion reflects some attempt to find the answer. If you watch this board for a week, you will see the same questions asked dozens of times. often the answer is easily found simply by searching on this forum, reading the Slack book, using google, reading the email in root's mailbox from Pat, using the man pages, looking in /usr/doc especially /usr/doc/Linux-HOWTOs. Good luck and best wishes.

here just some tips to get going :

-before installing you'll have to make some partitions.

-you'll need a "root" partition, thats going to contain the os-software
i have a 9 gig for that, and atm about 5.5 gig is used.

-a "swap " partition of about 2 times the mem. you have, but i'd say a max of 512 meg.

-a "home " partition is also advised.
there all the user settings and data are stored.
if you have one, you can always re-install without having to backup that.

-during install, you can choose what groops of sw to install.
just choose everything exept the " kdei " packages ( those are other languages for kde )

-also you're asked to choose a window manager.
i suggest you pick kde, it's the most userfriendly one.
gnome would also be ok to start i guess, but it's not gonna be part
of the next releases anymore.

-as said, you can choose lilo as your bootmanager, by adding win
and install in the mbr.
if you chosse to do that, pick the "expert" option when it comes to lilo configuration
but make one or two boot floppys anyway.

-after you installed and rebooted, you'll get to the commandline.
first make a useraccount for yourself
login as root and type " adduser "
set a username and a password, and add the groups " cdrom,disk,audio,video"

-then the graphics sys. ( x windows ) must be configured.
type " /usr/X11R6/bin/xorgconfig " and be ready to answer some questions about your system.
( you'll need refreshrates of your monitor for example )

then logout, login with your username and password
and type "startx"
if all is well, kde should start and you're running a slackware desktop system.

also, enabling your mouse scrolling is a good subject to test the
" forum search " option of this forum.

egag

Thank you for all your help guys, I will buy the set now and will D/L discs 1 and 2 when I can borrow gramps' machine. Windoze wouldn't boot with my burner so I had to disconnect it.

Don't hate me! I tried the Search feature, my browser timed out waiting, and I tried twice. I made a good faith effort to see if someone's already posted a question like this.

I have 576MB RAM, so, say I make a 1gig swap partition. Now suppose that later I get more RAM. Now I have to backup everything, delete both partitions, make a bigger swap partition, reinstall OS, and then restore my backup.

I believe there's a good reason for devoting a partition to swap rather than just a swap file. I bet it's how Linux is done, and therefore Mr. Torvalds had a good reason for making it that way. Either that, or it's how UNIX has been done since even before Linux. I just wonder why limit yourself to a fixed partition size for swap space?

no...........just add ram.there is no need for more swap.odds are you rarely use it as it is unless you edit video or something similar.linux does have the option to use dynamic swap files instead of partitions.

The official Slackware books is a bit out of date but still has alot of information that pertains to the lastest version. You might also want to look at The Revised Slackware Book Project. It has been around for a bit but is now an official Slackware project. You can now buy it at the Slackware Store.

A few users here have also put together some helpful guides. Check out Shilo's and Insyte's sites. Lots of useful tips.

There aren't many questions that won't be answered here. Between /usr/doc, /usr/doc/Linux-HOWTOs, the search feature here, Google, the books, the guides, and the people here, you should find all you need to get Slack up and running.

Welcome to Linux and Slackware

MagicMan

Guilty as charged... It is a good learning expierence. I ran as root from day two and I have hosed my box on more than one occassion because of it. I've even acidentally erased my windows partition once or twice... Personally I think you learn alot quicker when root. You also learn to watch what you type before pressing ENTER and you become very familiar with the install process in no time...

Running as a user from day one, all I really learned was how to 'su' to root because I wasn't allowed to do what I wanted as a user... That's a stale arguement tho. I always run as Administrator in Windows. If I feel comfortable doing that, then doing the equivalent in Linux is still alot more secure than in Windows... If you get hacked, then you'll quickly learn iptables (firewall) for linux and to keep extra services from starting on the boot. To each his/her own. I suppose it's best to start out using a user account tho...

As far as the bootloader goes, you can always use a boot floppy/CD to boot Slackware and leave the Windows bootloader alone as suggested earlier. At the end of the install, it will ask you about LILO... Configure it but don't install it. Make a boot floppy when prompted. After you boot into Slackware for the first time, you can:

That will give you an .iso image that you can burn to disk so you'll have a boot CD. Alot quicker than using a floppy.

Or if you want, you can just install LILO to your MBR. Ignore the warning abot it "possibly being unsafe"... I'm not sure why he says that actually. There are always 'recovery consoles'... Messing up your MBR, to my knowledge, will never hose data on your Hard Drive except for the first 63 blocks, which can always be repaired. I'm sure your familiar with the Windows recovery console. If you decide you want your Windows bootloader back, just boot up with your Windows CD, enter the recovery console, and type 'fixboot'. Or is it 'fix /mbr'... I forget.

Personally, I prefer GRUB over LILO. GRUB will be in an EXTRA directory somewhere on your Slack CD's...

It's best to do a "full install" as well in my opinion... That way you don't have to worry about missing anything down the road... There are quite a few Window Managers for Linux (equivalent to Windows Explorer I guess). The top 2 are Gnome and KDE... Might want to give them both a try. It will ask you at the end of the install which one you want to use. You can always switch later by typing 'xwmconfig' at a console.

There are a million and one things I could tell you. Just jump in and get your feet wet. You can always post back with specific questions.

Yea, I wouldn't worry about the SWAP space. You rarely use it. If I had a 200Mb .bmp file and I opened it up and started zooming in and changing things, it would probably eat alot of the swap. Other than that, it's really not used for much. Linux is designed to use your memory first, swap second. Unlike Windows which will always want to leave you free memory all the time. The linux swap has to be written to a specific filesystem type as well. That's why it's on another partition that is formatted in a linux swap filesystem...

Hello Zaelryn:

Here goes my two cents, I would recommend you to take a look to this post, it is just great, it help me quite a lot when I decided to give Slackware a serious look.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=174447

When you feel you are ready to compile your kernel and go from 2.4 to 2.6 please give a shoot to this thread http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=127095 , it is a great one too.

Here goes my personal way of getting X up and running, you might want to consider it as well, I use it all the time whenever I need to set up X and it always work for me http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=274003 pay special attention to post number six.

I hope this help you, I wish you the best of luck with GNU/Linux and specially with Slack, by far, IMHO, the best GNU/Linux distro.

I've got the Slackware 10.1 installer running now... a bunch of text flew by me and I'm suddenly offered to log in as 'root', so I type root and I get a hash prompt. I type fdisk /dev/hda and fdisk says unable to open.

Now, I've got 2 HDs, neither of which is in the motherboard IDE plug. Both are on a Promise Ultra66 PCI card. One 120gig drive on the card's '1' plug and a 10gig on the '2' plug. Googling the problem yielded very little relevant data. I've learned that the PCI card seems to "masquerade as a SCSI device" (which is greek to me). slackbook.org doesn't address this at all. info and man commands are not found, and help gives a short list of commands that doesn't include dmsg or demesg, I forget how to spell it, or any of the ls* series of commands (lspci, lsusb, et cetera). Even the commands less and more are not available to me. I'm stumped. My limited knowledge of linux has been spent.

P.S. It showed me a screen which, I think, wanted "kernel parameters" from me... I kept reading the screenful of info before the "boot: " prompt, and I barely had time to finish reading it before it timed out and send the aforementioned "bunch of text" flying by me.

This may also be relevant, the 120gig HD on the '1' port of the Promise Ultra66 card has one 20GB primary partition for Windoze 98, which is about half of the HD space the system claims that the drive is good for. That's right, the DOS fdisk program that I used to make the 20GB partition says that total disk space is about 48gig, so I was planning on giving Win98 a 20gig partition and give a the rest to Slack with oh, around 600MB for swap (I've got 576MB RAM). I have an Intel Motherboard and a PentiumII 450MHz processor, if that is relevant.

I can't think of any other details that might be relevant, I shall be watching this thread with baited breath

--------------------------------------------------------------
How does one type a "cautiously optimistic" smiley?

That rascal is an IDE RAID controller card, so you need the ataraid.s kernel. If you will
hit F2 and then F3 to choose a kernel like it says at that boot: prompt, you'll get those
options.

Now, while you're waiting with baited breath, you can stick that CD1 into your Windoze
box and read the file Slackware-HOWTO ... this is covered in there. That file tells you
how to install Slackware.

I wonder why so many people want to operate things without reading the instructions?

I will add that you should use cfdisk rather than fdisk, which is also recommended by
the fdisk manual page. So issue
cfdisk /dev/hda
or
cfdisk /dev/sda
whichever is applicable for those drives on a RAID controller card. You should see
some output about hda and hdb or sda and sdb as that _bunch of text flies by_
you over there.

hi friend dont go for big big things if u r fresh to linux then these links will help

go to the first threads(how i do it all)
[]http://slackbook.lizella.net/html/index.html

or http://shilo.is-a-geek.com/slack
[]http://www.bitbenderforums.com/vb22/showthread.php?postid=311808
[]http://linuxtipps.sourceforge.net/index.php
[]http://members.cox.net/laitcg/slack1.html
[]http://linuxpackages.net/ (packages)

put a bookmark... this will help to u to survive!!!!!!!!!!!!
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...php?forumid=14

hi friend dont go for big big things if u r fresh to linux then these links will help

go to the first threads(how i do it all)
http://slackbook.lizella.net/html/index.html

or http://shilo.is-a-geek.com/slack
http://www.bitbenderforums.com/vb22/...?postid=311808
http://linuxtipps.sourceforge.net/index.php
http://members.cox.net/laitcg/slack1.html
http://linuxpackages.net/ (packages)
http://www.slackware.com/pb/
put a bookmark... this will help to u to survive!!!!!!!!!!!!
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...php?forumid=14