Allo,
Tommorrow I am going to begin installing Slackware 9.1. I have downloaded install disks 1 & 2 and have read as much documentation as I can (alas, it probably hasn't been enough). I am going to keep Windows XP on my master HD as my brother uses this computer too and I need XP to do some C++ programming for school. I was wondering if anyone out there would be able to let me know of any things I may need to be on the watch for....

My rig:
Athlon XP 1600+
640 mb RAM
Soundblaster Live! Card
MSI GeForce FX 5200 128 mb vid card
One 40 gb master
One 200gb slave

On a more specific note, is there any special prep work needed for a HD that large?




P.S. I have installed Red Hat & Gentoo 1.4 before but couldn't get ALSA working in either distros so I am now trying Slackware

Slackware 9.1 uses ALSA by default, so you should be fine there. There are no special preparations needed for your drive apart from creating the needed partitions, I would recomend a root partition of at least 10Gb, a home partition of at least 20Gb and a swap partition of 512mb.

during the installtion how to you make each partition a root and a home? If once thats done what one do you make "boot"? As of now i can only make a primary linux partition and a swap partition.

Also, i only know how to use cfdisk.... how do you use fdisk? there're no man pages for fdisk.

Balkman,
I found this tutorial on partitioning here at LinuxQuestions.org:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...icle&artid=121

If it a walk through for partitioning your hard drive using fdisk.

Hope this helps!

tracedroute:

thanks for that link it really did help.... in fact i was having a lot of trouble installing Lilo and the reason behind it not working was i was partitioning my drives incorrectly

thanks,
jay

There is no need to use fdisk if you already know how to use cfdisk. I use cfdisk when I re-partition and it's pretty easy. If I remember right, and I probably don't, the Slackware installation disk even says to use cfdisk.

I'm probably crazy here, but I always plan on effing up everything the first time I install it. With that in mind, I like to make a / partition and a swap partition only when I go through the install for the first time. I take a lot of notes and tweak my system like mad. I always end up trashing it. Then, I re-install with a new fancy partitioning scheme, only do the tweaks that worked the last time, and end up with a kick ass system.

The best time to have your notebook handy is while you are installing Slackware. You'll see then where you can assign partitions.

Hope this helps,

I agree with shilo, in fact even the authors of fdisk agree with shilo, the following quote is from the fdisk man page (man fdisk),