How do I choose a Boot Disc?
 

I'm thinking of installing slackware, and removing RH9, and have some questions before I do.
1) h ttp://slackware.com/install/bootdisk.php wants me to choose a boot disc. How do I know which bootdisc I should be using?
2) How well does slackware work with dual booting? I *have* to have windows installed for games, and I don't want to erase the windows partition and re-install windows. If I just format my RH partition and put slackware on it, would that be enough? will whatever bootloader slackware uses be able to detect windows automatically or do I have to configure it manually?

thanks!

If your hardware can boot from a CD, Slack's software can, so just grab the disks. Otherwise, it depends on your hardware - bare.i should do for most, I think. There's a file around somewhere on the site that describes which ones are for what but the ISOs would be the way to go if you can.

Slack works great with any numbers of systems. You don't even need to wipe RH and then install - you can wipe *by* installing. Slack will notice your Linux partitions and ask if you want to use them for Slack, IIRC. And Slack should pick up your Windows partition - it's just an interactive menu of describing all your setup and setting up a lilo.conf that Slack will let you inspect when it's written. It's practically automatic - just a little menu stuff.

If you are having a regular pc with ide hard disks, then the default bare.i from the slackware 9.1 cd will do. once boot up , there will be ncurses screens to walk you through, not as pretty as RH's installer, but very functional and snappy.

so long as you have windoes installed first , the slack installer will see it and by using the "expert" mode of lilo, windows can be added into LILO. Post back if you face trouble.

The boot/root disk instructions are for installation from floppy, afaik. Slackware is capable of running on older hardware, so many people use it to resurrect old PCs that are not capable of booting from CD-ROM (or don't even have a CD-ROM drive). Therefore, the floppy instructions. If you can boot from CD, you'll do fine with the Slack CDs without need for a boot floppy.

You most likely should be reading the Slackware Linux Essentials online book rather than that Install Help link, which is less helpful than it appears in the sidebar.

As the others have said, you will probably have much less trouble with the actual install than you anticipate with respect to removing RH and preserving Windows. Slackware is a very, very solid distro.

Good luck.

ok sounds good. So I'm downloading the ISO's from ftp ://mirror.switch.ch/mirror/slackware/
and i'm using Kget. none of the files seem to complete downloading, they only get to 99% and then stop. Is this normal? also, what am I supposed to do with all the other files? i.e. the *.asc's and *.md5's? are they the last 1% of the ISO's?

Dunno Kget - usually download with mozilla, ncftp, or wget, in that order. The asc's aren't really important but the md5s can be used to checksum the ISOs - that'll let you know if the 99 is significant - some apps just go to 99 and exit prior to actually displaying they're finished. If the md5 sums match, it's fine. If not, there is some kind of problem. But, no, those other files aren't the missing 1%. :)

ok, I md5sum'd the iso's, they all seem to have downloaded fine. Then I tried to burn them to disc. What I got was a CD with an ISO as the single file. It didn't actually burn a bootable disc. I used gtoaster, -b isotrack_bootimage -c boot.catalog was the option for bootdisc. gtoaster claims to use cdrecord as the tool to record discs, and i couldn't find anything in the man page of cdrecord relating to bootdiscs. maybe I missed it...
either way, what's the best way to make these discs bootable? The only other times I've burned discs on Linux, I created the ISO images myself, and they were only for data backup so I just burned the image to the cd using cdrecord from the command line. I tried to use gtoaster this time because it had an option for bootdiscs. which didn't seem to work.

Just burn them from the CLI like you used to do.