I have a Dell laptop 600m with Win XP Home Edition. I have ordered the 4 CD set of Slackware 10.1 with the intention of installing this laptop. I have an 8 gig partition reserved for the Slackware. I have a moderate level of computer experience, some people think I'm an expert, but experts know I am not. My only experience with Linux is the Live CD of Lindows. I would like to install Slackware without damaging my XP installation, and want to be able to dual boot, as I used to do with Win 98 and Win2000. If I damage the XP installation , it will not be a disaster, as I have everything backed up, but I would prefer to avoid it.

I know there a lot of opinions on which distro to use, but I have this one, so I'm going to start with it.

Will this be a matter of booting with the CD and following the prompts, or should I expect to invest a lot of time learning this before trying the install?

The Dell does not have as floppy drive, will this be a problem?

Any anticipated problems I should expect, or watch for?

Thanks,
DCC

Checkout this link:
http://www.bitbenderforums.com/vb22/...?postid=311808

It should get you installed. The only problem I can see you having is the modem. Other than that I am running Slack 10.0 on a Toshiba laptop.

1) Read The Updated Book first (This is the revised version of "The Book" that comes with Slackware) Pay particular attention to Chapter 3.
2) Read the Slackware Introduction on the LQ.org Wiki
3) Prepare your drive
4) Install away!

The Slackware installation is not as complicated as some would have you believe, the menu driven interface really isn't that difficult to get round and master - but do read the installation instructions in the book first! (The "play it safe" method is to install all packages, then you can sort out later what you do and don't need)

You may also want to consider partitioning your drive before the installation - as a minimum, you will need a swap partition ("double your RAM", but no more than 256 - 512mb, Linux doesn't use swap that much on a modern with plenty of RAM) and then another partition for the installation. A full install of Slackware takes about 3GBs. (You can work out a fancier partition scheme later if you want.)

No, Slackware will boot quite happily from the CD.

Check out the http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=294126 post. He's a newbie trying to setup slackware as he's firts distro. 55 posts so far and still going.

IMPORTANT: Listen to cathectic and read all the documentation first. going through setup is easy but then after slackboots for the first time it will drop you to a shell and expect you to know what to do next. If you read everything he says you should be okay.

one note: if you windows partitions are fat32 then you can resize them and fit slack in there. If they are NTFS that you will have to remove all partitions and then create a new partitons for windows and linux. Install windows first then slack and make a boot disk when slack askes you too!

As far as I know, you don't. Of course, I was using Partition Magic as opposed to GNU Parted. Is this just a limitation in GNU Parted?

The XP partition is NTFS, but when I installed XP, I set aside an 8g partition with this in mind. It is currently fat32 format, but I can redo this when I install Slackware. The consensus seems to be that I should have several partitions for Linux, eg root, swap, etc. I assume I will be able to create these out of the 8g. Any comments on this?

you can make them when you install. You will have to make a swap (512mb max) and a / (root) partition. That is all you really need.

Since this is your first install, i would go with that.