I'm on 56k, so last night I downloaded Zipslack from the slackware 9.0 ftp.

I have it extracted to c:\linux and a partition (G:\) ready for it. Also the bare.i boot disk rawritexp'd and in the drive...

So what do I do now? Reboot? It says to reboot into MSDOS mode (I knew how to do this on Win =<ME but on XP I am unaware as to how). I could take it from there, but...


I've always disliked Windows (Especially ME)... but I also think it gets a bad rep for some things (I mean, for me, XP works just about perfectly, removed the standard shell, and it even looks good...) but I'd definately like to get going on linux.

(Note: with the addition of ZS I'll be triple booting off of one (70gb) harddrive. Two XP installs (One "clean") and three partitions. (C:\ (XP1, FAT32) F:\ (XP2, NTFS), G:\ (Lin, Lin3 (83 Native?)))

Thanks for the help ahead of time...

Please help, I really want to start using linux!!!

Are you trying to boot ZipSlack off the FAT32 partition? Nobody's ever called me on this so don't know, but I believe ZipSlack only boots off FAT, not NTFS. As far as getting into real DOS mode, I don't believe NT has it - if you have any DOS bootdisks laying around, reboot your machine with that in the drive and the floppy set in the bios, maybe. Problem is, DOS disks have a hard time recognizing large modern drives. If you have an ME boot disk laying around, maybe that would do it, as that was DOS 8 or whatever.

I dunno - try hitting F8 at boot and seeing if XP spits up a menu and has anything looking like DOS - I forget what it says. But I don't think it does.

I need to get to my bios (Consulted the slackware channel). I have a compaq and f10 or f12 isn't working =\

I have two partitions, one fat32 and one ntfs, i'm trying to boot off the fat.

If you put an empty floppy in your a: drive, then right click it in My Computer you should be able to make a DOS boot disk. Make that, boot from it, you should be fine.*



-zsejk

* disclaimer: I'm writing this from memory alone, so there might be some more steps involved

OOh! *goes to try* ----

--------

Writing Dos startup disk... (after I get Linux up and copied to the Lin partition I can use partition manager's startup util....

------------

Rebooting...
(Will continue with edit)

(Bleep, I just typed this and acidentally pressed undo, dangit, so forgive me if this is blunt...)

Rebooted, didn't boot from floppy. Rebooted, this time got into bios. Changed order, rebooted to dos mode. Launched linux.bat and near the end (that I got to) it complained about not being able to read the boot sector with any filesystem. Then it said it couldn't mount (I can't remember what, forgive me, no photographic memory).

Rebooted, logged in, started geoshell, and here I am again.

Going to try rebooting and starting up with this uncommented instead of the lin partition (duh)

\linux\loadlin \linux\vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1 rw

Or should I just run loadin?

-power! ............

I'm dull today, this won't get looked at again unless I post in it again... Man I am really slow tonight... Forgive the double post, again... Just RTFP... Heheh =)

Did you try the uncommenting of "\linux\loadlin \linux\vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1 rw" yet? If so, I'm curious as to your result.



-zsejk

I'm sure you have already looked at this, but just to make this thread as complete as possible (for future reference maybe), here's a link to ZipSlack booting information:

http://www.slackware.com/zipslack/booting.php

-zsejk

I read this, and rebooted with dos, and ran linux. It worked! I read the mail... (I got 4 instead of 2, doubled...) and that's about all I figured out about the command line. I know. I suck. WHOOT!. anyway, at least I ran linux. Now... What are some recommendations now? Get a operable GUI maybe...? Then copy over to my lin partition and see if I can boot to it And if I can, get my winmodem to work (New hardware one coming soon).... Yay, lol....

Hehe... congrats! And happy Slacking to you!



There's tons of beginner's guides out there to get you started; an example would be http://gcross.customer.netspace.net....er/primer.html (haven't checked it out, but hey... that's your job anyway ).

Just search on http://www.google.com/linux for whatever you want to learn, and there's bound to be some pages with help.

-zsejk

Wow, I'm guessing the full cd came with stuff like GNOME? Well, I'm quite a few pages into that faq and I'm just going to say that it seems to be a long stairway to that platform of 'linuxness' way up there... heh, but it does look good...

*Is reviewing KDE and GNOME* KDE Looks... Better.. but GNOME looks... more open.. *gah*....

kde is prettier and runs better (for me)... i also found kde easier to work with than gnome... personally i do not even install gnome during install because i dislike it so much.

Well, I downloaded the gnome installer, I'm going to get my Winmodem to work then connect and download it, from there I can download KDE =P

You can use both right?

^_^