Can anyone guide me thru installing the drivers I need once I've installed Slackware? With a fresh install of Slackware, my wireless card isn't recognised, nor is my soundcard.

Wireless card: RT73
Sound card: Realtek High Definition Audio

I can do without sound for while, but I'll definitely need my wireless working pretty much straight away.

Also, I wonder is there a handy way of copying across all the Backtrack programs from the Backtrack DVD along with their KDE Menu items. . ?

Once I've installed Slackware, I plan on upgrading it fully. (I do this with "slap-get --upgrade", right? I'm thinking of upgrading the kernel aswell, but do you think that's maybe too ambitious a task for me right now?

I had a quick glance over the Slackware book... the reason I hadn't gone to read it before is that I wanted to learn Linux itself rather than learning distro-specific stuff, but it turns out that the Slackbook is mostly a Linux! Good stuff, I think I'll print it off on Monday :-D I'll be trying to get thru another book at the same time, "Cross-platform programming in C++", but I'll try to spread my time evenly among them!

Oh yeah, by the way, you know those tarball files we download and compile, well I've notice that all the ones I've compiled have only contained C rather than C++. Do people distribute C++ code in the usual tarball way? I plan on getting into the whole tarball thing, making little programs and distributing them as tarballs. (I don't suppose there's a website for this. . ?)

Oh yeah, once I've installed Slackware, how can I set it to log in automatically? (The account I'll be using won't have a password... it will be root actually).

Two other things:
1) What are all those files that have a ~ at the end of them?
2) How do I change my keyboard region at the commandline? Before I do startx, it's set to a US keyboard, but I've got a British keyboard.

To set-up sound, run this at run level three:

#alsaconf

#alsamixer (be sure to un-mute all settings)

#alsactl store

To set-up your video card, mouse, keyboard you can run

#xorgconfig (this program will ask you a series of questions which will enable you to set-up your video card, keyboard, mouse.)

Or you can run

#xorgsetup (this program will auto-magically set-up your video card, keyboard, mouse.)

Have fun and feel free to post back here if you encounter problems. We will help you:-)

Welcome to Slack!
I don't know about your wifi card, but about the other things...

There isn't an easy way I am aware of to install all of Backtrack's programs in Slackware, so I'd imagine you should install each program you want one at a time. For this, I highly recommend http://www.slackbuilds.org . Read the howto there to get started. The quality of the scripts at SBo is superb, and nothing beats the control of being able to read/modify the build script yourself before installing.

In my opinion, I would stay away from slapt-get (it wasn't installed by default in my Slackware 12 install; I have no experience with it.) Install Slackware 12.0 and then install all patches available as listed in http://www.slackware.com/security (they are all in patches/packages on your favorite Slackware mirror.) That's as much updating as you need to do :-). If you really wish to stay on the 'bleeding edge', you can run Slackware -current. It's not guaranteed to be stable, and I'll leave it to you to figure it out :-)

Make a regular user account with a password. Do not log in as root for everyday use! It's a guaranteed bad idea ;-)

The files with ~'s at the end of them are backup files created when you edit a file with vim or another text editor. You can turn off that feature in most editors, and it will vary from editor to editor.

I don't know about the keyboard settings.

Happy Slacking!

For the wifi, I would compile a 2.6.24.X kernel, as it contains the all Realtek wifi drivers and thus makes wifi a non-issue with RT chips.

1) AFAIK those files are backup files.

2) You can access that setting with 'pkgtool' command.

This can be done during setup. This is detailed in the Slackbook.
http://www.slackbook.org/html/instal...p.html#AEN1001