I've tried burning the 4 disks for slackware from a mirror... but all the disks contained numerous corrupted packages... I'm out of CD-R's but I would like to put slackware on my laptop...

Is it possible to install online, and how would I go about it...

While Slackware doesn't offer an net install similar to Debian, you don't actually need all four CDs to install. The first will do if you don't need KDE.

You might try downloading the first CD again and check it with md5sum (also available for Windoze) before burning anymore costers.

Dennisk

You only need the 1 CD to burn in order to boot.
The second contains KDE and some other stuff.
3 & 4 are the source packages. In 3 there is also an /extra directory with some extra stuff.

Anyway I never had this kind of problems. Did you check the checksum ti see if the downloaded images are ok?

To be honest I don't know anybody having installed the whole distro online. Not sure but I think you need at least the first cd to proceed.

I still need a GUI... although I'm planning on purchasing a healthy amount of Linux literature with my paycheck this friday, I am for all intents and purposes... linux illiterate. It's incredibly awe-inspiring to have mastered windows as I did, and be humbled by Linux.. regardless my resolve has not been weakened I'll never put my CC number on a Windows computer for as long as I live.
Granted my switch to linux hasn't been smooth... I feel it's almost ready for "prime time"

but that's why I'm getting slackware for my laptop (I'm using SUSE 10.1/Windows on my desktop) slackware forces you to learn... it will be my little study buddy

But yeah, I'm gonna have to redownload the ISO I guess... it seems to me that something went terribly wrong during the download... there were a number of errored packages on the installation CD's. When I attempted to reboot into the OS it encountered so many errors that it stopped itself from running some script (forced it to wait 5 minutes... wash, rinse, repeat). So no go with my first attempt at slackware...

Don't worry. You'll have xfce which you might like even better than KDE and on the commandline mc is your friend. :-) Also, google on "common Linux commands" for links to get you started.

Dennisk

Yeah, I like XFCE... I still have some questions though... I want to get used to installing from source... but source is distro independant right... I can download source for a program and that same tar.gz will work on all my distros correct?

Quick answer: Yes. It should

ok... now this is what I don't understand... everyone talks about these package managers and all that... I can see them being really useful for updates... but personally it seems like it's better to install other software from source... I know what the difference is, but as a user should I be leaning more toward finding good repositories or just downloading the source for the programs I want and making it myself? (which is something I was hoping to do with Slackware)

What I do as a slackware user is to compile things by my self and then pack them. This way I install it through the packet manager and i have the benefits of both. I think this is what most slackware users do.