About to dive into this fun world of Linux!

[CrAz3D]

I might have a (backup... yes... backup ) copy that I can let your store....  CD or Floppy version? 

Uh, it's been... resolved. 

heh, ....<serious>yes</serious>

I rebooted last night, took about 30 minutes I think.  It turned on and had to reboot again...?, that went good too.  I now have my main drive C: @ 64.5gb of the 80gb & a drive E: @ 254mb in FAT32.

I'll install FC5 this evening when I get home from work...I hope this works...eeks.

How hard/possible is it to undo all of this, or possibly just delete FC5 & load Slackware (which I downloaded a while ago)?


EDIT:
Also, what packages might I want to add?  I'm thinking OpenOffice and similar basic "tools"

[iago]

If you have room, add everything.  In a month or two, when you are more confident, re-install and only install what you want.  That's the way I started with Slackware. 

[MyndFyre]

I rebooted last night, took about 30 minutes I think.  It turned on and had to reboot again...?, that went good too.  I now have my main drive C: @ 64.5gb of the 80gb & a drive E: @ 254mb in FAT32.

Just so you know, your drive isn't *really* 80gb.  For some reason, the industry has allowed hard drive manufacturers to call a megabyte 10⁶ and a gigabyte 10⁹ instead of the original, correct value now expressed by GiB, which is 2³⁰.  Windows measures drive sizes correctly according to GiB and MiB (2²⁰), so an 80gb hard drive, 80,000,000,000, is really 74.51GiB, which is why you have such a discrepancy between your expected drive size and the size of your drive C:.

Also, like we talked about last night, Linux won't think of your hard drives as C: and E:.  It will load them into /dev/hda1 and /dev/hda2.  Anaconda will probably automatically add the FAT32 drive to your fstab table, so it should be automatically mounted when you start up.

I'll install FC5 this evening when I get home from work...I hope this works...eeks.

How hard/possible is it to undo all of this, or possibly just delete FC5 & load Slackware (which I downloaded a while ago)?

It's fairly painless; pretty much it only involves deleting the Linux partitions with the Disk Management MMC snap-in (or PartitionMagic) and then resizing your c: partition to its original size and marking it active, all of which can be done without a reboot.

EDIT:
Also, what packages might I want to add?  I'm thinking OpenOffice and similar basic "tools"

OpenOffice will likely be installed by default.  I'm not sure that you'll want to install *everything*, despite iago's suggestion; FC5 can take up to 9gb to install, which doesn't leave you with a terrible lot of room.  There are a lot of server toys that you won't need, that are just entirely impractical (for instance, you don't need both MySQL and PostgreSQL unless you're really THAT HARD CORE).  You also don't necessarily need the development tools unless you're planning on programming, in which case I definitely recommend installing Eclipse. 

[CrAz3D]

Good stuff.

As as usuful tools, I'm thinkin of like image editting, music player, office-like things (like you said is already installed), firefox, thunderbird.  Does this stuff already come on the FC5 discs or do I have to find all of it seperate?

[MyndFyre]

The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, and several of the other items already are on the CDs (although you may prefer XMMS to the music stuff FC5 comes with).  And you need to do a custom install to get Thunderbird -- it wasn't on be default when I ran the install.

[CrAz3D]

cool, I'll run a fun custom install tonight (& probably end up bugging you a bit, too, if ya dont mind)

I hope this is fun

[CrAz3D]

It has been suggested that I try a "Live" boot of Linux before going through the entire install for this.
Would y'all suggest that too?  KNOPPIX was suggested

[rabbit]

The only thing I've used is Slack, so that's what I'll recommend.  I've also never used a live boot other than the Slack installer, but I've never tried live X either, so I dunno.

[iago]

It has been suggested that I try a "Live" boot of Linux before going through the entire install for this.
Would y'all suggest that too?  KNOPPIX was suggested

If you want to peek around, Knoppix is nice.  It lets you see Linux without committing to anything.  However, if you actually want to use Linux to any extent, use an installed distro. 

[CrAz3D]

It has been suggested that I try a "Live" boot of Linux before going through the entire install for this.
Would y'all suggest that too?  KNOPPIX was suggested

If you want to peek around, Knoppix is nice.  It lets you see Linux without committing to anything.  However, if you actually want to use Linux to any extent, use an installed distro. 

mk....well, I've already invest 6 cds & 2 floppies into this , looks like there is no turning back 

Tonight shall be the night!

[MyndFyre]

Since you already repartitioned, there's not much point to using a Live boot CD.

[CrAz3D]

Since you already repartitioned, there's not much point to using a Live boot CD.

k dude

[CrAz3D]

I'm about to begin, any last suggestions?

[wires]

If you're looking for something that has no shit on it, I suggest ArchLinux.  It has 2 different installs, a base (comes with a basic linux installation, where you install everything else) and a full (like Slackware where it has all the stuff you won't use). 

I chose the base iso and installed X, OpenBox3, etc with pacman (a bit like Debian's/Ubuntu's apt-get and Slackware's package manager, which I forget the name of).  It takes a bit to get it working, but if I can do it, I'm sure you can too.

[CrAz3D]

welp, i'm off then....maybe the penguin be with me