Hello, I have never installed linux before in my life but have been doing some reading on the slackware site and am intrested in becoming familar with this OS. I have a few questions which I'm sure are very basic but am still lost.

First off, I have an 80gig hard drive and am running windows XP Home. Is it possible for me to run Slackware Linux on this same hard drive and have a selective startup where I can chose to boot either Linux or Windows? If so how and what software would I need to do this?

Secondly, to install Slackware Linux am I set with the 4 install cds or do I need to make some sort of boot disk to be able to use the cd-rom for instilation?

Lastly, how much of an 80gig hard drive would you recomend for the Linux Partiction?

Thank you to anyone who took the time to read my post and thank you in advance to anyone who helps me out or points me in the right direction.


-=Breault=-

1. (is it possible to run slack on the same drive) YES and it's rather simple to do..

2. at least two of the four cdroms are bootable,

A recomendation. before installing slack use the 2nd cd, live bootdisk, boot it, hit enter at the bootprompt, login as root, and poke around, youll start in a console, u can use startx to open a gui.

this cd is a full install, and will help familiarize you with lin a little bit, 2. help to find out if your hardware is supported, 3. help you figure out what to install with lin, and whether you really want it..

after trying that, find out if your windows installation is using the fat filesystem or the ntfs filesystem, as the major problem you may have is partitioning your drive, without erasing windows..

also check out the sites mentioned around lq
linux.org
tldp.org
and other documentation sites..

any other help needed just ask

__________________
linux 101 (man man)

To add to miaviator's post - you can choose between Slack and Windows and Slackware comes with the LILO bootloader that will make this possible. No extra software needed for that.

For a first install for a home system you might want to keep it simple and have a single root partition. That can be, say, 2-4 gigs depending on what you install and what you want to add. But you'll probably want to have some space for your personal files. So you could make / bigger or create one more partition for /home and make it as large as you like.

The only gotcha to this is your current filesystem. NTFS is a pain and Slackware can't (AFAIK) resize such a partition. Also, while it can read from it out of the box, it can't (safely) write to it.

So, for this, you'd need ntfsresize (I think that's what it's called) which is open source and freely downloadable, or you could actually borrow the fine services of a Mandrake disk. Or you could use some proprietary resizer, which I don't recommend. Not for 'religious' reasons but because they often seem to fail with Linux. And, as far as handling the files, it might be best to create a shared directory that's formatted as FAT32 that both Linux and NT can safely read and write to. (NTFS write support is coming along though and you might do a web search on that - there is a project that uses Windows' own drivers to deal with the system, but I don't know much about it. While I have NT systems I don't use them so haven't followed developments closely.)

If you have XP on FAT, none of this applies and it's a breeze.

I have NT5 and 5.1 with Linux on each but all I did was add a second drive to one system and resized while testing Mandrake on the other. Both methods worked great. I've also shared between Win9x and DOS on other boxes and that's even easier.

Thank you to: linux 101 (man man) and Linus Torvalds. You guys helped me out a ton. I appreciate it more then you know. Thanks~

I hope you don't mind me posting my question here Breault.

I'm trying to install WinXP and Slackware as well and am having a bit of trouble. I install WinXP fine and Slackware installs fine, when I boot for the first time I get "Invalid Partition Table". Here's what I do to install. The disk is 30GB, I boot to WinXP and give it a 20GB partition and format it FAT. Then I boot to the slackware CD, Slackware 9 iso burnt to CD. I use cfdisk to partition the drive, I make a 512MB swap and then a root partition with the rest. This is where I think my problem is. Am I supposed to make the Linux root partition bootable and do I use the "Write" feature to finalize my choices? After installing the packages I install LILO on the superblock.

I also tried installing Linux first with LILO on the MBR and then WinXP but WinXP destroyed LILO.

I'm gonna experiment some more. Thanks in advance.

Success. Well sorta. I got WinXP to boot after installing Slackware. Was able to add Linux to the bootloader. Now my nic card isn't getting detected. I'm posting this from PHLAK. Would the config file used by a network card be similar in both Slackware and PHLAK, and where would I find such a config file? Thanks in advance.

edit - Still having problems with my nForce onboard nic card. After searching these forums I see that alot of people have the same problem with nForce boards that I do. My board is an AOpen AK79d-400VN nForce2 MoBo. I tried to download the tarrballs from nvidia. I'm a linux newbie but I finaly figured out how to use gzip and tar commands. Used make then make install. I'm not sure what's supposed to happen or what I'm supposed to do after that.

What about these forcedeth drivers I've read about? I downloaded the files but haven't a clue what to do with them.