I am currently running RH9 and would like to soon Dual Boot with Slack 9.1. I have downloaded the ISO's and have interest in testing the slack out. A friend of mine has told me Slack is hard to work with and there are no RPMs for slackware or vewry little. I still want to try it out because of the strong support givent to it here on LQ. Some things I do not know how to do or have a concern with are the following:

How do I partition the drive for the Slack install?

Will the slackware and RH9 be a good way to have a backup in case something goes wrong on the sytem? For example, last semester the system was not working very well on RH because of Ximian Desktop. If I had slack on another partition to boot would it have been a solution to my end of the semester computer problems?

How hard is it to install programs on the Slackware.

When I create the new Partiition and put Slack on it I want to get Tripwire and chkrootkit on it. How do I do this?

Will slackware come with XMMS, Mozilla, OpenOffice, Nautilus.......

Will the RH9 users home space be assesible from the Slackware distro?

What other things should I be concerned with while installing Slackware?

Does fluxbox come included as a WM for Slackware?

If not, should I still install the KDE and GNome for them to work under fluxbox or will the fluxbox take care of that for me?

Is there a shortened version of the KDE and Gnome for fluxbox I could use. I have a P4 with 128mb of ram and like to have the system running as quick as possible.

I think this should take care of all the questions I have for the Slackware install.

wow, thats a lot of questions. not sure if i can answer them all but i'll share what i do know. i am by no means a slackware expert, but i use it solely and have had no issues with it and like it very much. i have tried others and have come back to slack and will never go back.

first off...welcome to Slack!

Partitioning:
i would suggest putting slack on its own drive if possible and if you want you can install LILO or Grub on the root drive of that drive, if not you can use grub from your RH9 installation to boot slack (or LILO if you have that installed). point is you can update and edit your current boot loader to boot slackware on a different drive or partition, you dont need to install a boot loader with slackware in this case.

depending on the size of the drive you have or space available for slack will determine the partitions. slack does not partition automatically, you have to use cfdisk. on my 14 gig drive i have a 1 gig swap on /dev/hdb1, 7.6gig / on /dev/hdb2, and a 5.4gig /home on /dev/hdb3.

Software Installation:
If you want to use a gui installer, you can use KPackager in KDE (this is what i do). you can install debian, rpm, tgz, or tar.gz files using KPackager. it is very easy to use and you can uninstall packages also.

There are a number of packages that come standard if you do a full install including Gnome, KDE, and all the apps that come with them. mozilla 1.4 and koffice, but not openoffice. although it installs easily enough as do other programs like mozilla 1.5 or 1.6b.

you can also compile all your apps from source if you want

Other:
some things to be concerned with would be that the X Window system does not start by default. slack goes into runlevel 3, and it uses runlevel 4 instead of 5 but all that is documented well in the inittab file

i have tried to have two different distros sharing the same /home directory, but i could not access it from the newly installed distro. dont remember what they were (probably slack and rh though). someone may have a solution to that or there may be a workaround to it

there are other desktop environments and window managers that come with slack including fluxbox and xfce. dont know about a shortened version of KDE or anything like that.

Well i hope that helps with my limited knowledge. i would also suggest trying it on a seperate machine or drive so as not to interfere with what you have installed.

good luck and welcome to slackware!!

Any way you want, using fdisk or cfdisk.

Will the slackware and RH9 be a good way to have a backup in case something goes wrong on the sytem? For example, last semester the system was not working very well on RH because of Ximian Desktop. If I had slack on another partition to boot would it have been a solution to my end of the semester computer problems?
Dunno if it will solve all problems but it will certainly help. I hate dual-booting but I also don't much care for having just one system on an important box.

How hard is it to install programs on the Slackware.
It varies. Installpkg is a breeze. rpm2tgz usually works great. Compiling from source is usually a breeze. But sometimes a given compile will be a pain and anything can go wrong with any of it, I suppose.

When I create the new Partiition and put Slack on it I want to get Tripwire and chkrootkit on it. How do I do this?
Dunno.

Will slackware come with XMMS, Mozilla, OpenOffice, Nautilus.......
Yes, Yes, No, Yes.

Will the RH9 users home space be assesible from the Slackware distro?
Yes. You'll probably need to edit /etc/fstab after boot.

What other things should I be concerned with while installing Slackware?
Not much special to worry about, really.

Does fluxbox come included as a WM for Slackware?
Yep. Flux 0.1.4. Flux 0.9.6 is in /extras, I think.

If not, should I still install the KDE and GNome for them to work under fluxbox or will the fluxbox take care of that for me?
Not sure I understand the question. If you mean you want to use KDE/Gnome apps under flux, that's not much of a problem but you at least need the libs and, in my experience, you really need the whole frigging desktop even if you never use it. I just gave up on using KDE/Gnome apps at all because I don't want those IDEs on my systems. But when I *did* have them, there was no issue with fluxbox.

Is there a shortened version of the KDE and Gnome for fluxbox I could use. I have a P4 with 128mb of ram and like to have the system running as quick as possible.
Not that I know of. There's an amplified version of Gnome for Slack (dropline) but not a cut one.

I think this should take care of all the questions I have for the Slackware install.
Hope this helps.

-- Actually, thinking about the tripwire question some more, I don't know what all may be on the disks or at the Slack mirrors in current. Plus you could go here to look for additional packages. And, otherwise, simply hitting freshmeat and grabbing and compiling the source - and using 'checkinstall' rather than 'make install' will create you a nifty slackpack and install it.

I share my /home partition between Mandrake and Slackware, although I only use slack and it works fine.
And about the package question... at first I didn't like it very much that slack has its own packages and doesn't use rpm, but when your used to it, it isn't a burden. I have never used a distro that has this few problems with compiling and there still is checkinstall.

don't hesitate on trying slack, it isn't as easy as RH, but slackware absolutely isn't hard as well besides it is a very clean and fast distro.

Cool stuff, I hope this weekend I will be able to install the new Slack distro. I have a 40 gig HD. What shoudl I put in as a command to create the partition to creat slack on. Currently there is only the swap space and the main drive. I think I have 500mb as swap.

Partitioning: I usually keep /usr/local and /home in their own partitions. This way, you can keep your custom data even if you need to reinstall or upgrade your distro. (/usr/local is where non-distro, hand-compiled software and user-created scripts should go).

Packaging: contrary to popular belief, there are third-party package managers for Slackware, on par with apt-get or yum. These are: swaret, slackpkg and slapt-get. swaret and slackpkg are included in the Slackware extras CD (or in the extras directory from the ftp site). swaret has dependency checking.

swaret and slapt-get will also download packages from the official Slackware mirrors and the unofficial LinuxPackages site. LinuxPackages is the Slackware equivalent to [http://rpmfind.net]RPMfind[/url] or [http://www.apt-get.org]apt-get.org[/url]. You can find many unofficial Slackware packages, such as MPlayer, on LinuxPackages.

If you need to compile by hand, use checkinstall; it's included on the Slackware extras CD. Instead of ./configure && make && make install, you do ./configure && make && checkinstall. Checkinstall installs your software and creates a TGZ (or RPM or DEB) package that can be cleanly removed by the Slackware package management tool pkgtool. Checkinstall works best with Slackware (IMHO); you can save your checkinstall-created TGZ packages for installations on other Slack boxes.

Fluxbox is included in the Slackware extras CD.

For Gnome, someone mentioned Dropline Gnome; it's an excellent, tweaked Gnome desktop for Slackware. I love it. You download and run the installer from the Dropline site, and the installer then fetches all of the necessary packages. If you want to use Dropline, don't install the default Gnome packages from the Slackware CD.

There are no Slackware packages for OpenOffice. However, the default binary installer from OpenOffice works fine. Just install to /usr/local/openoffice, then create a symlink in /usr/local/bin to /usr/local/openoffice/soffice.

One final thing: learn how to use tagfiles when installing Slackware. Tagfiles are a great way to automate package selection during installation. You can make up several sets depending on what kind of installation you want to do (ie. no GUI, KDE only, etc.). I can install Slackware now in 30 minutes. Here is a short JustLinux tutorial on using tagfiles.

I just bought a new HD for the slack distro. What whould I do to do a dual boot with the two distros? Will the slack distro be safe on the slave partition when I am tweaking it for security over a period of time and still using the RH9?

'slave partition'? If you mean the drive set up as slave, yes it will...

You'll have to fdisk /dev/hdb (slave drive on first IDE) into the partitions that you'd like, then run Slackware install and select the drive you've partitioned.
If you boot with RH9, you will probably boot with grub and I don't know how to configure it to boot slackware, it can't be hard though.
In lilo.conf it is just adding something like:

image=/boot/vmlinuz #this entry just points to the appropriate kernel image
label="Slack"
root=/dev/hdb1 #of course this must be set to the partition you installed slack on
read-only

maybe with comparing this to your grub config, you can manage to make an entry. Oh and I almost forgot, when it asks if you want to install a boot loader, just say no (it is the default I think).

Good Luck

tweaking for security? Well, don't use root. There you go. Now your about 90% secure. I say 90% because there could be something with the kernel that hasn't been discovered yet.

Or do you mean like intrusion detection stuff? If so...why? Are you holding pentagon secret's? If no, I'd say your wasting your time.

I wouldn't, ok, I know chances are few that people will attack your computer, but I think he just wants to learn more about security.
If he is just seeking more knowledge, then why would he be wasting his time? I wouldn't do it, but who am I to say when he is or isn't doing something useful?

true. sometimes things are worth doing "just because". But if it is to truly "secure" his system and not just to learn about it, then it's probably more work then it's worth. But oh well. Great thing about open source. You can do whatever the hell you want with it.(provided the license allows it)

Now I use just use Linux because it is a great OS, but I didn't start Linux to improve anything, I justed wanted to know what it was, how it worked...
I think the fact that I didn't even knew these things (like simple shell scripts that perform complicated tasks) where possible, was one of the things that made the discovery this fascinating.

I think many people on this forum just want to try things, only to know how it works. Often you try things you know you'll hardly use or need.

I think I switched because a combination of curiousity, friends telling me linux is better, the cool look of linux, the flexibility, less viruses, more security, learning new things, makeing using a computer interesting instead of point and click, not stuck with windows, free programs, and the challenge of it all.