How to use Slackware 14 alongwith Windows 7.....??

good evening guys... i am new to linux, i wanted to start linux with Slackware, so i downloaded Slackware 14 today...
i have Windows 7 installed in my laptop and i wanna use Slackware and Windows 7 togather.....so i wanna know should i choose dual boot or VMWare.....????
and how to do dual boot with Slackware or install Slackware using VMWare....???

Weather you use a virtual install, or a full install depends how comfortable you are with re-partitioning your hard drive.

If you have never partitioned a hard drive, I would suggest you get your feet wet on a virtual install first. I use Virtual Box to run windbloze, and it is not difficult to install an operating system, if you follow the install instructions. I have never used VMWare, so no comment there. If you go this route, the Slackware install docs do not cover a virtual install. Basically, you would do all the steps, except disk partitioning and formatting; and you would not have to install a boot loader, the default being Lilo on Slackware.

If you decide to re-partition your hard drive, you will need something to shrink your windows install. It probably owns the entire hard drive now. There are some nice live distros you burn to a CD, and then run graphical tools to do the shrinking, partitioning, and formatting. G-parted and Parted Magic are two that come to mind. You need about 10 gig for a full install. I would suggest more, say 10 for the root, a small swap partition, and as much space as you can afford for your /home partition.

Your choice.

If you install Slackware using vmware, the install will be the same as installing to a computer that doesn't have the hard drive partition or formated. You will have to partition the vmare disk with cfdisk before running setup, and install lilo during the installation to the vmare disk MBR, as if you was installing to a real computer.

You can use Vmware, although I prefer Virtualbox.

There are numerous tutorials about dual booting. You can use gparted live http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php to repartion. Or you can just buy another hard drive. You can use lilo to boot both, or use the windows boot loader.

On one of my laptops, so as to not disturb Windows, I used gparted to resize and split off a 20GB partition for Slackware14, installed slack to superblock, and then used bootpart http://www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm to use the Windows XP boot loaded to boot Slackware. You can use http://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/ to do the same for Windows 7 (YMMV: I have heard good things but have not personally used it).

See also
http://docs.slackware.com/slackbook:booting
http://www.slackbook.org/html/booting-dual.html

Enjoy!