Hello,

I just downloaded slackware from bittorent and I have no idea what to do next. Do I burn the folder to a disc? Aren't there iso burners out there? Is that what I have to use? I can't find the .iso .... it's just a file full of everything...

help.

Hiya!
What you downloaded should be a DVD or several CD images, or .ISO files.

What exactly do you mean by 'a folder full of everything'? Almost sounds as though the operating system was installed on a computer, or someone just copied everything from the CD's and made bittorrents out of it, in which case I don't know what to tell you. You'd have to re-assemble all the 'stuff' into .ISO images and then burn them to CD's I guess, but that isn't the right qway to go about it, nor would it guarantee you would get a good, untampered-with system.

You ought to download it properly, from a reputable source, who offers the .ISO images as well as the checksum files that you use to verify that the images are good.

If you do this, then you would use something like "Infra Recorder" for Windows, to burn the images to CD's, then install the system using them.

Check the links to the right for "Download Linux" or go to distrowatch.[org/com] or the Slackware homepage and locate a download mirror, for reliable downloads. And download the MD5 checksum files too. They are used to verify the download is good and undamaged.

NOTE: When you burn it/them, use a low speed like 4x. This will better guarantee that the discs will be burned reliably.

Hello!

Thanks for the great reply! I should have gone into greater detail with my first post, but I'm feeling under the weather and was temporarily insane.

The files that I came out with after downloading them with my bittorrent client are:

slackware-12.0-install-dvd.iso.asc
slackware-12.0-install-dvd.iso.md5
slackware-12.0-install-dvd <---Folder 3.62 GB

The folder contains:

extra
isolinux
kernels
patches
slackware
testing
pasture
slackbook
source
usb-and-pxe-installers

It also came with a few changlog,read-me's,blah blah's, and an md5 checksum.

Each folder contains more folders and other zipped files.

So much!

Should I re-download from a mirror or am I onto something here?

Thanks!

You should have slackware-12.0-install-dvd.iso, burn that to a DVD-R, then boot up from it, then install.

Yes, as BrianL says, the 3.6 GB thing should be the .ISO file with which you would burn the DVD.
The ASC file is likely the PGP signature used by the application GPG or PGP to verify that the stuff you download is digitally signed by whoever assembled it or put it up for download, and the MD5 file verifies that the .ISO file is untampered with by validating its checksum. From a linux terminal, you would type md5sum /path/to/the/ISO/file.iso and in a moment, it would return a long string of junk (the checksum) , which you would compare to the string of junk in the md5 file.
To use the ASC file, you would in Linux console type gpg --verify /path/to/file.ASC /path/to/ISO/file.iso and it would tell you who's signature was used to sign the file, and whether or not it's valid.
There are also md5-checking tools for windows, but of late several of them have been returning erronious checksums. One called 'md5summer' has proven to work on Vista and probably other Winblows OS's.

In any event, it appears that you technically have everything, but you ought to re-download the .ISO file of the DVD itself, as who knows what or why that is a folder rather than an .ISO.

Thanks for the replies guys.

I'll re-download the iso and report back with my findings.

I went to download Slackware 12 the other day, and couldn't find any of the actual ISOs in their official mirrors. Might be the problem you had.

But now they have official torrents of it up at http://slackware.com/getslack/torrents.php