I suggest you shrink the Win7 partition using the native Windows disk administration tool.
For a laptop I suggest a swap space of aproximately double that of the physical RAM as you are likely to want to set up suspend to RAM or suspend to disk.
For a working Slackware system I would suggest at least 20GB as it is surprising how quickly you can use disk space.
I would suggest that you create an extended partition for your Slackware install and swap space, otherwise your Win7 boot partition and Win7 C drive, then your Slackware install and swap partion would use all the available primary partitions.
I would just skip it. You can always make a USB boot system in an emergency. There details in the BOOTING.TXT file in the root directory of the install media.
Windows is a very useful tool for troubleshooting Linux! Use the device manager in Win7 to get details of yor hardware, otherwise use Linux tools such as 'lspci' when you have completed the install.
The hostname need not correspond, but it may be convenient to maintain the hostname. I do this so that my modem/router assigns the same IP address and hostname to the MAC address.
The domain name can be anything that you choose in this situation. I just use home.org.au
If you are new to Slackware, I _strongly_ suggest you do a full install. This will install the X windows system.
The best office suites that are compatible with Microsoft Office are OpenOffice or the new fork LibreOffice. The OpenOffice suite can be installed using the Slackbuild available at http://www.slackbuilds.org/. Eric Hameleers (aka Alien_Bob), a Slackware developer and demigod, has made packages available for LibreOffice. See here http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/firs...r-libreoffice/
If you do a full Slackware install you will also install the KOffice suite. Personally I do not use this, but you may find it useful.
If you need full Microsoft Office compatibility, (e.g. VisualBasic support in Excel) then you will need to look at other solutions (e.g. virtual machine technology or perhaps Crossover Office that runs under WINE). I generally just find it easier to boot into Windows!
PDF readers are well supported in Linux. With a full Slackware install you will get 'okular' which works well for me as well as the older but often useful 'xpdf'. There is also a native Linux Adobe Acrobat version. There are also other third party applications available, which I will leave to others to offer their opinion.

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Hey, thanks a lot for your detailed response.

I'm not too sure about what you mean by this:

"I would suggest that you create an extended partition for your Slackware install and swap space, otherwise your Win7 boot partition and Win7 C drive, then your Slackware install and swap partion would use all the available primary partitions."

I'm also not sure what "suspend to RAM" and "suspend to disk" means, but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

I think I'll follow your advice and do a full install.

I think that a swap partition double your RAM size is way to large, I use single RAM size and have no problems with Suspend to Disk. Suspend to RAM shouldn't get any problems with any swap size. But there were already flamewars about this I think.

There is a technically limit that you can only have up to 4 physically (which means in other words 4 primary or 3 primary and 1 extended) partitions on a disk with an old-style MS-DOS partition table. This format is widely used, also in Linux. A typical install of Windows 7 will set up two primary partitions, so it would be the best to do your partitioning the following way, so that you don't get into trouble if you want to do a repartitioning in the future:
1. Use the Windows Partition Manager (you can find that in Administration in your Control Panel) to reduce the size of your Windows partition.
2. Restart your system and boot into your favorite live system or the Slackware install CD.
3. Use the partitioner of your choice to set up an extended partition. Into this extended partition, create a logical partition for swap and a logical partition for the Slackware system.
4. Install and have fun.

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According to tronayne in here Win7 takes 3 primary partitions. So, trying to incorporate the advice above, is this how I should divvy up my partitions?

Primary partition 1: Win7
Primary partition 2: Win7
Primary partition 3: Win7
Extended partition:
- Logical partition 1: Slackware root
- Logical partition 2: Slackware swap

Sorry, but I am a little confused. The Win7 partition utility actually only creates two partitions when I shrink the C drive.

The book also recommends that I create separate partitions for a few directories like /home and/usr for security reasons.

If anyone is dual-booting Windows and Slack, please tell me your partition system, and I'll just follow that until I get the hang of things.

I always saw only 2 partitions created by Win 7, but maybe I am wrong here.
Your parition scheme looks good. Of course you can use separate partition for /home and other directories. I personally use a seperate /home-partition, so if I mess up my system my personal configuration files can be left in place (Of course they are also backed up.)
May be you want a separate data-partition, formatted to NTFS, so you can share files with your Windows installation.

So may be you want something like this:

• Primary, Win 7
• Primary, Win 7
• Primary, Win 7
• Extended:
  • Swap, your RAM size
  • Slackware /-folder, 20GB
  • Slackware /home-folder, According to your needs, I would go for 10-20 GB, may be less
  • Data-Partition for sharing files between Windows and Slackware

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That looks good. Thanks, TobiSGD.

How large should the data partition for sharing be?

And all these physical vs. logical partitions could be set up during the Slack installation, right? Because if not, then I'm missing something with the Win7 Data Management configuration.

Only thing you have to do in Windows regarding the partitions is to shrink your Windows-partition. For the data-partition, i Would shrink Windows as much as you think it will be usable for you, so that you just give the rest of the disk as a storage place for your data to that data-partition.

I missed that too. I consider it a deficiency in Win7.

Okay, here's a bit of an embarrassing question: I installed Slackware, and, as far as I can tell, it went smoothly. (Getting on the Net is a whole other story.) I made sure that the /root partition was bootable (flag switched on). However, since I installed LILO in the root partition (did not make a boot disk), I'm not sure how to boot into Slack. My only options are still

Internal HDD
CD/DVD Drive
Onboard NIC

How do I get into Slack? I think it's something I have to do in fdisk, but have no idea what.

Here's something else that came up unexpected that was not in any installation screenshot I saw: After partitioning my drives, the following message came up on screen:

FAT or NTFS Detected

Partitions of type FAT or NTFS (commonly used by DOS and Windows) have been found on your system. Would you like to add these partitions to your /etc/fstab so that these partitions are visible from Linux?

I think this is the data partition TobiSGD above was talking about. For security reasons, I chose no. If I chose yes, then that would enable me to access all my Windows files from Slack, right?

Also, I created four partitions for Slack:

/sda5 - /root partition - 20 GB
/sda6 - Linux swap - 4 GB
/sda7 - /home - 8 GB
/sda8 - /usr/local - 20 GB

All are logical, but the Windows 7 Disk Management shows them as primary. Any idea why?

You are wanting a multiboot setup, but by installing LILO to the Slackware root partition on /sda5 you are still using the Windows boot loader. What you need to do is to install LILO to the MBR (master boot record) so that the Windows boot loader is replaced by the LILO boot loader. (Yes, there is a scary message about the danger of doing this, but do it anyway!) Then when you boot, you should get a menu from which can select to boot Win7 or Slackware.

This is not correct. You want the Win7 boot partition to be the only active boot partition.

This is the Slackware installer recognising your pre-existing Win7 partition formatted with the NTFS file system and offering to add an entry to the /etc/fstab file (think of fstab as an abbreviation for file system table as it describes the file systems available to your Linux setup and how they are to be handled) so that you can use the NTFS file system in Linux.

Braindead? (If you have not got the message yet, I hate Windows more by the day! I think Win7 reaches new heights for Microsoft in treating users as fools.)

As you are installing for the first time, I suggest you start again doing a full install to /sda5 and with the swap on /sda6. Keep /sda7 and /sda8 unused. Then when you have more experience, you can use this disk space to suit your purposes e.g. using a separate partition for your /home directory.

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Hi,

First, the '/root' is the home directory for the root user. You should be using '/' for root partition if that is what you wish to do. Gnu/Linux doesn't need the boot flag set. M$ will need it set.

You wrote to the superblock. If you want to use 'lilo' as the bootloader then you should be writing to the 'MBR'. Thus using 'Lilo' to manage the booting for the system. You would need to include the M$ partitions in the stanza of the '/etc/lilo.conf' file. Remember that if you make changes to the '/etc/lilo.conf' file you will need to re-run 'lilo' as 'root' user.

To get to your Slackware install, you can use the Install cd, notice the suggested prompts to aid in booting the Gnu/linux.
The easiest way for corrections would be to use the install cd1 to boot the system as if you were going to install.

After you get to the login then from the cli (command line);
You can 'man commands' in the above example to get a full understanding of the commands and options.
You should 'man lilo' to get the rest of options.

You should now be able to re-boot your system.
This was from the beginner lilo operations? If so then you are being queried to use the found filesystems then you will need to input a mount point for the 'NTFS'. Then you would be able to access the files. You will be asked to set the permissions for users for the filesystem.

The W7 management should show these as logical within the extended partition.

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Okay, I'm just going to chalk attempt 1 as failed and try to re-install.

To double check:

1. The root partition SHOULD NOT be set as bootable.
2. LILO SHOULD be placed into the MBR.

Yes and yes.

onebuck has also supplied the method you can use to fix your existing install. It is what an experienced Slacker would do. I considered this approach for you, but if you are not comfortable with Slackware then a reinstall allowing the setup scripts to do their thing is probably easier.

Yes, my thanks to onebuck, but I am not über familiar with the Linux commands yet. I'll keep his input in mind once I gain more experience.

-----

Well, I successfully installed Slack (and this time I can actually boot to it and log in). As I logged in as root, I got a pretty long message from Volkerding on how to use Slack. I'll need to go over that in detail.

Now, I need to go over the Slackbook bit by bit so I actually know how to use this thing.

As for loaders, I think I'll stick with LILO for now and learn the basics before I dare to get fancy with switching to GRUB.

Thanks for all your help, everybody. This has been quite the learning experience.

P.S.: All seven of my partitions are still listed as Primary in the Windows Disk Management tool. And the Recovery partition is listed as Active. Isn't the C:\ volume the one that's supposed to be Active? I really hope this doesn't screw things up later.

Hi,

W7 does this. The OS is hooked to that partition to allow the boot(IPL) to launch the SPL(secondary program loader) which loads their kernel. Just M$ means of protecting the install. Poor if you ask me but Gates is the billionaire.

Glad to hear you have a system up an running.

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