Before I start I need to know how much space will need. The system requirements on the Slackware site say 5+ gig. This seems low to me. I am doing this on my old laptop. It only has a 40gig HD and if possible I want to duel boot and keep XP. I will not really need much storage room for files as this will only be used for my learning Linux and I can save files to my main computer.
Thanks
BTW I have been using Linux Puppy on this computer and everything seems to be supported.

A full install of Slackware (which includes KDE) takes up about 5.5 GB. If you want the KDEI (international languages and stuff) then this adds about one more GB. If you only want XFCE, and no KDE, then this will take about 3.5GB of space.
You could spit your 40GB hard drive equally between Windows and Slackware.
Ideally you should have a separate home partition for storing your data. I would setup 3 partitions:
root 10GB
swap 1GB
home the rest of the hard drive.
This will leave more than enough space for learning Slackware, or any distro.
Read the Slack Book to get started: http://slackbook.org/html/index.html
Also read the Changes and Hints.txt that is available on any Slackware mirror, or on the first install CD or DVD.

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I have a test partition for slackware which is only 5GB. However it does not have KDE and other software. 10GB + a swap (1GB perhaps) may do as you may want to install other packages such as open office, etc.

Ooppss. Too slow

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I would suggest 10GB as a minimum. I have on old laptop with a 20GB drive that has XP in 10GB and Linux in 10GB. Also, allow for another partition for swap space. This I would recommend to be approximately twice the amount of physical RAM. This can be used for suspend to disk (i.e. hibernation) which I find very useful in a laptop.

Edit- Also too slow! But all the advice is similar!

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The space requirements in the minimum requirements for Slackware are reasonable for installing the system. It should fit in about six gigs. That won't leave you much room for installing additional programs or for maintaining and storing data files.

If you don't plan on using the Slackware partition for anything other than learning, that should be enough. And I second the previous posters' 10GB recommendations--that will give you some wiggle room.

An alternative might be to install Virtual Box for Windows and learn Linux in a virtual environment.

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Greetz
Since you already have good advice on using what you have I'd like to offer a few points to consider. Girst some backkground you can relate to. Since you've run Puppy (smart first step, btw) you know the iso is just under 200MB. I have an ancient laptop (PII-433MHz 256MB ram) upon which I have Slax, which is also the same size as Puppy, and I put it on the hard drive. In a very short time it grew from 200MB to 4GB with all the apps I wanted.

In your case besides all the apps out there, it is good to remember that Slackware does not recommend a minimal install, especially for beginners. Part of the reason for this is due to Slackware's unique packaging system. Because Slackware doesn't employ software to resolve any dependency issues, you, as the administrator must. This is much easier if you do the "Everything" install as it will come up less often. This means more disk space. Plus it isn't good to let drives get too close to full.

It is a pita to have to resize partitions after the system is installed, so to avoid outgrowing your partition, this implies planning for even more space. My decision was easy on the old laptop because it only had a 2GB hdd and I already had desktop systems that ended up sprawling over multiple drives to steal space. So I easily decided to but a new drive. I bought a vastly faster 60GB drive for around $45 US and I think it was a smart purchase. Besides the luxury of room, the increase in disk throughput (higher rpm as well as better technology) made this old relic actually useful, especially once it finishes booting. I can't get Hi Res because of the crappy video chip but I can watch YouTube music videos on it in most cases with no stuttering.

It might be a good idea to consider a new drive, if not now, in the near future. Your present one will surely work but odds are pretty good you will stick with Slackware and love new stuff since it is way prettier and more functional than Puppy and they both run faster than XP on limited hardware.


install

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You've got plenty of room. The full install only eats a little over 5.7 GB of harddrive. I have an installation tutorial you can check out:

http://www.genek.net/LinuxAdventures...allation1.html

That website also includes tutorials on configuring Slackware, setting up the KDE desktop, and Slackware package management.

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Always going to keep that puppy live CD. It made me look like a computer genius last week. A friend's XP system failed to boot and he brought it to me. They hadn't done as I told them and keep a backup of their Documents, pictures, and music etc. I turned in on and it went to a black screen with the cursor blinking in the top left. It wouldn't respond to the keyboard, wasn't looking good. I put in puppy and restarted. The computer started like a champ, but no sound or wireless. Mounted the hard drive and copied their files to a thumb drive for safe keeping. As it turns out they had a virus and a malware. The MBR was corrupted. They got lucky, I had a CD with some open source tools on it and one was able to restore the MBR. I will bet they still will not backup their files.

Thanks for the advise everyone.

Well partial success. I have my partitions set up and lilo is working. For some reason my CD drive doesn't want to go to the next disk. I checked sum and verified data when burning the disk. I am downloading the DVD version now. I'm going to burn it and transfer it to my Windows partition and try to install from the hard drive.

I couldn't get the Windows partition mounted for the install. Tried to use Puppy to move it to the /home partition, but Puppy wouldn't mount the drives formatted ext4. Reformatted ext2 and moved the install files to the /home partition. Booted from the install CD and directed to install from the hard drive. Installed without problem. Now working on setting everything up and getting everything supported. I think my CD drive on the laptop is going bad as it is also giving problems in Windows. I have an external USB DVDR/RW, but haven't got it working yet in Slackware.

Finally got wireless working correctly. As a bonus reconfiguring my network also solved a problem I was having with Windows 7.