Not sure if this should go in the noob thread, but anyway:
How long does slackware take to install? I have my drive partitioned and ready to go. However, this is my first linux and I want to learn things the right way the first time so I decided to go with slackware. I have pretty good experience with CLIs, (read: CLIs don't daunt me) and I think I can handle the installation no problem but how long will it take? On a relatively new computer, less than 3 years.

Less than 30 min for a clean run.

well then here I go!

This depends on the number of packages you choose to install and your system, so I doubt you can get an accurate answer. On my Athlon XP 2000 the whole installation process can take 15 to 25 minutes depending on what I decide to install (Usually X, KDE and web dev stuff).

Hey I just installed slackware (would have taken 30 minutes except i messed up during package selection and didnt realize enter was oking my choices so then i had to start over) but now I still booted into XP. During installation I set it to load LILO onto the partition or whatever choice 1 is, and not to the MBR which it said was dangerous/risky, can't remember the exact wording. It mentioned that choosing 1 would require me to set that partition as bootable using fdisk. How would I do that? is there a way to do that with other software, like partitionmagic?

Or is there some way to use the NTLDR for Linux? I read somewhere something about using NTLDR by adding an entry called Linux which hands it off to LILO. I did make a boot floppy, so I will try that if no one can help me.

If you don't install the LILO bootloader to the MBR you can't use Slack to dual boot your system. Installing it to the root partition really doesn't help you save that you use some other application to manage your mutli-OS. As long as you have Slack on a primary partition you should have no issues.

Using ntldr to load lilo is *absolutely* the worst option you could go for.
You will get sick of copying over the lilo boot sector record as you update in future.
Using lilo as the primary loader is only marginally better.

If you wish to proceed, there are a heap of how-to's around. Have a look at this one for example - start at step 11) using your boot floppy. Talks about RH, but is generic enough to be useful. If you only have one disk, all the /dev/hdb? references should of course be changed to /dev/hda?.

Well, since the slackware installer was so easy (I really don't know what people are on when they say the installer is bad, I love it) I think I'll just reinstall it and this time install LILO to the MBR. That is about the only bad thing I saw in the installer, since he said it was somewhat unsafe I thought it might not be a good idea. Alternately, I could just use the boot floppy to boot into slack because it could possibly confuse other users of this computer since it's a family computer.

i.of.the.storm, don't worry about LILO being the bootloader for Linux and/or Windows, you can make an entry for Windows and let it be default with a delay time of 3 secs, so if you don't press anything on those 3 secs, Windows would boot. Also newer versions of LILO allows you to put a nice bitmap in the background so it won't scary people
You can avoid reinstall Slackware to install LILO, just boot into Slackware and run /sbin/liloconfig