Yep... that'll probably come in handy once or twice.

It's not a good idea to use a fat32 partition for linux. Slackware will need about 3G for a full installation. I don't think you'll need more that 128MB for swap but it depends from the ram you have (512MB is really enough whatever ram you got) .
You may use fdisk or cfdisk to erase the fat partition and create the 2 linux partions you need.
Most slackware users use reiserFS instead of Ext3
In slackware forums there is a guide of how to do it all.

Thanks Perfect,

Actually I prefer to use Partition Magic to create and format partitions as I really don't want to take the chance of losing my current Windows OS should I make a mistake with fdisk. I'm running 512mb of ram with 32mb of it shared for my onboard video. Everything I've read thus far says that the Swap partition should be twice the physical ram. Doesn't that mean that my Swap should be about 1gb? That seems like an awful lot if that's the correct formula I think it might be a good idea to go and get that guide.

Cheers
conductor

The rule of thumb is dated. It was more relevant in the old days - as perfect_circle says, 512 Megs should do it no matter what.
As for partitioning, there was a problem earlier with some distributions not being able to detect partitions created with Partition Magic. When I have to partition a system, I use Knoppix or PCLinuxOS and run the program QTPartEd. It is simple, intuitive - great

The guide says to use twice the physical ram you have but trust me on this, u dont want to use 12,5% of your linux space for swap. I have 1G of RAM. If i had to use 2Gb of hd for swap i would stop using linux(well ... thats not true). If it weren't the 512 MB of swap partition fedora had created automatically when i had 256 MB of ram, i wouldn't use more that 128MB of swap. Also, if you want to be able to resize/control your linux partition with Partition Magick then don't use reiserfs. Use ext2 or ext3 (better ext3) because as far as I know P.M does not support reiserFS.

Who said newbies can't install Gentoo? If you follow the instructions you can't go wrong. You mightn't have any idea what it was you just went through but you can do it

There is no best distribution. Repeat after me: there.is.no.best.distribution. We are Linux users or Linux users to be - get used to doing a little research. Distrowatch, our search function and a number of other resources are available to help with the decision, but as with a favourite colour or which car to buy the answer is "what do you want to do with it?".

My advice to anyone who wants to use Linux is this: just use it. Try out a few different distributions and see which you like best. Make an informed decision. We are all biased here towards our favourite distros and can only tell you our favourites.

Thanks perfect,

And thanks to all of you. You're all very helpful.

Yeah I understand the 2x the ram formula for a Swap partition was the rule of thumb in the past but now that's changed, that's a good thing. Anyways it's time to bite the bullet and get this Linux train on the track Wish me luck.

I'll be Back
conductor

No kidding. I recommend trying Slackware as well - try several distributions and learn a bit,and decide which you like. Try the harder ones, and easier ones like Suse and Mandrake as well.

If you're going to install Slack, then read up on unix system basics.

You've got to know your /usr/bin from your /dev/null.... as it where.....

There are plenty of slack how-to's out there - look in the forum here....

I would point out that Slackware is a KDE centric distro -- gnome development has stopped
I've just installed Ubuntu. And while it was easy it did screw some stuff up/the gui conifugration crashes....

The old .ICEauthority issue, perhaps? Yes, that annoys me heavily..

even tho' i use slackware(only 'cos i couldn't be a**ed to do a 6hr gentoo install), i wouldn't recommend it to anyone anymore.Mainly 'cos there is no package manager with the default install. I've heard of slapt-get but haven't tried it.

as a matter of interest, does any1 know of a good reason why i couldn't copy gentoo from my laptop onto my desktop? I'd only have to edit grub.conf and fstab, right?

I tried RH9.0 but I decided to move to SuSE since most people who I know say that it is very user friendly and is easy to learn,

What about installpkg,removepkg and pkgtool?

yeah, but those are pre-compile tgz packages, you might as well use rpms as there's more of them.