Generally Speaking....

[Andrew Blunt]

firstly i'd like to say this site is fantastic, the amount of information on this site is outstanding, ^5 to you guy's for this...

now on to my what could be a 'lengthy' post...

ok so i'm in a college course, and my web programming instructor had me install Slackware 12.1 on to my school laptop...this went without problem, everything worked as it should...now these laptops are obviously wireless so he installed the wireless Broadcom drivers and internet access was ready and able pretty much instantly..


so he tells me i should give it a try on my home pc as well, so i went and downloaded Slackware 12.1 via torrent file from the actual slackware website, itself...it burned to dvd np (3.7+ GB) in fact it installed without complication as well....though the first time i installed it, i already had a windows xp pro install...so before i installed linux i used Norton Partition Magic to change the current partition size around, thus giving me enough space for the ext3 and swap partitions linux uses...This was no problem either, after changing these things, i rebooted the windows os and everything worked fine as it was before...COOL!....

except i have a few concerns now...

after the windows xp partition was resized and i installed slackware on it's own partition with the swap partition, it didn't work as well as planned...linux i mean...it had KDE with it and for the life of me i couldn't figure out how to actually LOAD kde and get to the desktop type enviroment...now i know it's " startx " which i was totally oblivious too as i'm new to linux...

so after i installed linux something had happened to my windows partition and i lost all the data from it including the operating system itself....i think the possibility of this problem was to do with "Write" when doing the swap and ext3 partitions...once those partitions were written to the disk it seemed to of deleted my xp without me actually doing it...this conused me and still does...not sure what in the world happened...any ideas?

now, i have slackware still on DVD and am interested in, installing it again however i'd like dual boot with windows xp pro sp3...HOW do i go about this without screwing one or the other up, and making sure i can boot either one when i want to, like i should be able to????

then there's the NIC issue....when i did installed linux and had it running with the kde, it wouldn't get any type of internet access...when i went into the "Network Connections" via KDE it told me "Your platform is unsupported" therefor not giving me any kind of info for my connection (which i didn't have at the time or ever at all with linux) ....i'm NOT wireless and my network adapter is Realtek RTL8139 Family PCI Fast Ethernet Nic ...now i know the board will still read it as PCI even tho it's ONBOARD, so i disregard where it says PCI as a problem...

i figure it's because the actual network adapter is not installed on the linux operating system and thats why i cannot get online with the linux OS ....so here's my question(s) to you all....

first...how am i supposed to get the right drivers for linux for my network card if i can't even get online with linux..

second...is there a way to network a Microsoft operating system (xp pro) to a Linux operating system?...if so, I can network another pc to the linux machine and download/install drivers accordingly..

third...please remember i do not have a usb thumbdrive nor a floppy drive in the machine with linux...

fourth...if i go on to the windows machine and find/download the drivers needed for the NIC on the linux machine, burn them to disc and move on to the linux machine attempting to install drivers TO the linux machine FROM the disc i just burned with them...


one, two three and four being my main issues and Dual Boot being high priority as it is a shared computer amongst a few people with little to no computer experience at all, linux is not suitable for them, thus requiring dual boot....the best method of doing dual boot would be the right idea.....


i know that was a long post and a lot of reading but i'd like to say thanks now in advance to anyone with enough patience and courtesy to actually read it all and reply with some kind of help...so again, thanks & hope to hear some help back from someone soon!

[Freston]

That's a LOT of questions!

I'll try to answer some of them, but please forgive me if I'm not addressing all of them

First off, welcome to the forums!

You say you have Slackware 12.1 installed at the advice of your teacher? What kind of advice is that? I don't mean it's bad advice, I'm just curious as to the motivation. Slack is a great operating system, but it has a very steep learning curve. It's the most BSD like of all the Linuxes (with Gentoo in it's trail), so knowledge of Slack also translates relatively easy to both other distro's as the *BSD's. I can see the benefit of that when you're learning about web based apps, server functions, that sort of thing. I use it as a desktop too, but it requires some manual configuration to get it that far.

The reason I ask though, is this (bear with me):

then there's the NIC issue....when i did installed linux and had it running with the kde, it wouldn't get any type of internet access...when i went into the "Network Connections" via KDE it told me "Your platform is unsupported" therefor not giving me any kind of info for my connection (which i didn't have at the time or ever at all with linux) ....i'm NOT wireless and my network adapter is Realtek RTL8139 Family PCI Fast Ethernet Nic ...now i know the board will still read it as PCI even tho it's ONBOARD, so i disregard where it says PCI as a problem...

When you're running Slack, you want to steer clear of all nifty GUI tools that are on board. That is, if you use Slack as a means to get under the hood, dirty hands and all. If you use slack as 'just another Linux distro' then by all means do with it what you want. But you'll find other distro's are far better geared towards graphical configuration.

Now according to this it should work on Slackware. It is not said that it doesn't by the way. Sometimes you have to reset your modem. What is the output of this command:

ifconfig

And if that command gives you nothing, or only the 'lo' interface, then try this:

ifconfig -a

If that gives you more, for example this is mine:

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:1c:31:cb:2b:aa
          inet addr:192.168.1.101  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::21b:38ff:fecb:c585/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST NOTRAILERS RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:392151 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:466586 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:141571726 (135.0 MiB)  TX bytes:240450988 (229.3 MiB)
          Interrupt:16

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
          RX packets:282 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:282 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
          RX bytes:9906 (9.6 KiB)  TX bytes:9906 (9.6 KiB)

See if you have that extra interface. On my machine, and on many others, it's called eth0. That's the most default name, but it might be called differently. Ra0 or something like that for RaLink cards. Anyway, post back here your results and we'll have a look.
If you're eager to keep going, these are always good to try:
adjust to the name of your interface, and be root:

ifconfig eth0 up    # brings up the interface
dhcpcd eth0       # request DHCP address

first...how am i supposed to get the right drivers for linux for my network card if i can't even get online with linux..

As above. It may not be necesary.

second...is there a way to network a Microsoft operating system (xp pro) to a Linux operating system?...if so, I can network another pc to the linux machine and download/install drivers accordingly..

Preference?? Do you just want to share between two accounts on one machine, or do you want something like a light fileserver routed in your network? There's more than one way to do this, Samba for example, but maybe you want a shared partition?

third...please remember i do not have a usb thumbdrive nor a floppy drive in the machine with linux...

Duely noted

fourth...if i go on to the windows machine and find/download the drivers needed for the NIC on the linux machine, burn them to disc and move on to the linux machine attempting to install drivers TO the linux machine FROM the disc i just burned with them.

..
Au! No. You're not gonna burn a CD for ~1MB. You can read your Windows partitions from your Linux install and copy it over, or at least you should be able to.

one, two three and four being my main issues and Dual Boot being high priority as it is a shared computer amongst a few people with little to no computer experience at all, linux is not suitable for them, thus requiring dual boot....the best method of doing dual boot would be the right idea.....

Sorry, I can't help you with that. From the Slackbook I take it you should do this at install time, choosing the expert mode during LILO installation. It looks like it's not to hard if you do it at install time, but as I don't have a valid license for Windows I have no idea.

[Andrew Blunt]

wow that is an incredible amount of help offered, however between now and my post time i have entirely formatted and now only happen to be running xp pro for the time being...so i'm going to install linux again and see what happens....when i get that done i can do what you advise in the post, command wise...as i can't without linux installed lol

i am looking forward to being able to do many Server and client side things with linux but am equally interested in learning a new GUI at the same time, so I'm assuming (i don't know much about any other linux) that Slackware should work for me...with that all being said i will return shortly with my headway on your reccomendations...thanks again and talk to you soon!

oh yeah one more thing, could you maybe inch me in the right direction for networking a linux and windows pc together? some kind of guide somewhere or something?....please remember the two networked machines require a wireless network connection as the OTHER pc, is using a wireless card (but not the one with linux)

[jmadero]

Please split up posts a bit more, you'll get a lot more people answering your questions

[Freston]

oh yeah one more thing, could you maybe inch me in the right direction for networking a linux and windows pc together? some kind of guide somewhere or something?....please remember the two networked machines require a wireless network connection as the OTHER pc, is using a wireless card (but not the one with linux)

The Slackbook - Samba might get you started.

[Andrew Blunt]

The Slackbook - Samba might get you started.

thanks man, i actually just used the guide for dual booting from the slackbook.....anyways, i got linux and windows installed dual boot....both work, both have internet and i'm all set....thanks a million, i guess it just worked on it's own when i installed...the internet is what im talking about working....so i'm good to go!!!...thanks again freston you were a true help, i learned a bit....