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I got the latest copy of the Slackware Liunx operating system and I am planning to install it on my computer.

My computer is a Pentium III 450 mhz, with 128 MB of Ram, 8 MB graphics card and I got a spare 13 GB hard drive which to install the operating system on.

What are the main steps I should through to install the system and make it work.

Slackware is one of the harder distros to install and use. I couldn't do it, but it's been awhile since I've tried and it may have gotten easier since then, I don't know. If you want me to recommend a distro that is easy to install/use, I can, but I'm afraid I can be of no help when it comes to Slackware...

I love slackware, still using kernel 2.4 though.

Your best bet is to go to www.slackware.org/book

read it and then install; it's not hard.

Distro's I've used: Mandrake, slackware, red hat, fedora, ubuntu, debian, gentoo and suse, there are more, but those are the main ones.
Fave Distros: Debian, Gentoo, Slackware and Suse.

I personmally would'nt go for slackware as a first distro.
nor ubuntu(debian based)

go for suse, easy to instal and configure.

Download Suse evaluation 9.3 DVD or Cd's: eval versiojnis just full version of suse 9.3 without the phone support, stupid I know, but free!!

I suggest using Bit Torrent to download them.
get the torrent from tlmp: http://www.tlm-project.org/public/distr ... /i386/9.3/

You do not want the live Cd though, A live CD is like knoppix....

Good Luck!!

I'm using a debian based distro now which I highly recommend called Kanotix. It is alot like Mepis except it is bleeding edge and is based on Debian sid instead of sarge so you get a bleeding edge system with up to date software. I like it.

I also don't recommend Slackware, Debian or Gentoo if you're new to Linux.
Stick with Ubuntu ( A Debian distro), Fedora, or SuSE, they all have easy installs.

I've had reasonable sucess with slackware 10 apart from the lack of support for pocket PC PDAs and the like which i need since I take all my class notes on an HP ipaq with one of those keyboards it docks into because my handwriting is illegable and a laptop isn't practical because the battery life is too pathetic and it's completely useless if I have no way to print those notes out or save them to a computer. (linux geeks: SynCE does not work with my device I already tried that)

Anyways. In my experience with current versions of slackware the main thing that's difficult is the X configuration. You have to do this manually since slackware doesn't have an auto detection routine.

I'd suggest you write down or print out the details of all the hardware in the computer beforehand as this makes things much easier.

You'll need to find documentation of the X org configuration file online and create this file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf
it can be a really frustrating exercise. Basically this file tells the X server what kind of graphics card, monitor, mouse, keyboard, etc you are using. It might be easier to use another distro that can make this configuration file for you.

Once you get to this point you can choose your desktop environment. I like KDE but I wouldn't even attempt to run it on a 450mhz machine, it's slow enough on a 1.3Ghz amd athlon. My choice of desktop for a low spec machine would probably be xfce4. The packages on the CD have the basic stuff like open office and so on. If you want to download extra software, you have to compile it from source manually unlike other distributions. This is anoying and i haven't had too much luck with doing this, since unlike FreeBSD where this is a matter of typing
./configure
gmake
gmake install
in the right directory (the command is make on linux)
on slackware i've found i almost always need to go chasing around the internet for dependancies which in turn have more dependancies. Even trying to figure out which library a program depends on can be virtually impossible if it doesn't say in the documentation so i gave up.

For large programs compiling from source takes a long time, and on a machine that slow it would be impractical. Eg openoffice.org took about 24 hours to compile on my 1.3ghz machine. KDE took 30 or so.

I hope this gets you started.
But you'd be advised to go for a distribution that has a decent package system
All this ended up being too complicated for me to figure out in the end so i still use windows

Good luck

~EG (Maria)

Slackware 10.2 is supposed to have tools to resolve the dependancy problem, somewhat. There are other distros based on slackware, and if you are relatively new try vectorlinux as a start. if you move from machine to machine SLAX is a live cd and it is great.

Im also thinking of putting linux on a old computer that I havn't used in a while. Its a 333mhz PII with 128 mb of ram. Im thinking of putting mandrake 9.2 on it. I have a few old red hat versions of linux too and I have Mandrake 10 but I don't think there is any point in putting mandrake 10 onto this dinosaur computer.
oh it only has a 4gb hard drive as well.

Will KDE run like crap on this machine? I put Knoppix 3.3 on it running KDE and it was fine. In fact running better than windows 98 runs. But the machine wasn't able to run Knoppix 3.7 when I tryed.

Theres no way im downloading any version of linux on a dial up modem. I wish I had broad band . But im not going to be getting that any time soon.