SLACKWARE installation:

My machine (a ASUS motherboard with a 486DX2-66) came with one 540Mb SCSI-II
disk, formatted to DOS and running DOS6.2. I wanted to have a 200Mb DOS
and 300Mb linux partition. (I also added the highly recommended swap
partition - i use 16Mb swap with 16Mb physical memory). Be sure to have
the following ready:
    - a few (3 will do) floppies; they will contain the boot, root and
      final boot floppy
    - a directory on your DOS part with the A series (a1, a2, a3, a4)
      (4 floppies worth). The other series you can always do later

So here was my path to victory:  (be sure to write down on which ports
the modem and mouse are located, and if you can, find out what kind of
mouse you have e.g. microsoft compatible, PS/2 - busmouse etc.) before
you start with this endeavor. I am also using the most simple (but
probably more laborious) approach. If you can load linux from a CDROM,
it's  *a lot* easier.


First in DOS:

> SCANDISK          (a DOS6 utility) to make sure disk is fine
> DEFRAG            to make sure all DOS files are sitting in the
		    first FATs on the disk - there are also public
                    domain programs for this, NORTON also has one.
           ** NOTE: You probably should turn of the windows swap file
                    (from the extended 386 menu under Windows) before
                    running DEFRAG)
> FIPS		    a PD utility (e.g. on 
                    ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/Install/fips12.zip
		    you use this to split the partition, very easy
                    Be sure to read FIPS.DOC if there are hidden files
                    in the last blocks on disk.
> SCANDISK	    scan the new smaller C: drive to see if still ok
                    this is just to make sure nothing bad happens - i
                    believe you may need to reboot to have DOS see the
                    now smaller size of this partition.

Then I rebooted with the boot disk, followed with the root disk.
You wind up logging in as root with a memory version of the
unix filesystem (df will show a 1440 kb or so filesystem). You can then
(my device is SCSI, i.e. /dev/sda, for IDE drives it will be /dev/hda,
/dev/hdb etc.) do something like [names and numbers vary for you]

# fdisk /dev/sda
	p		(review what current partition is - should have 2)
	d 2	 	(need to delete partition 2 in order to split it)
	n p 2 408 986	(make new partition #2 - your numbers will vary)
	n p 3 987 1018	(#3, the 16M swap - you will be different)
	t 3 82		(set this to linux swap type)
	p		review
	w		write it ...... !!!!!!! 
# mkswap -c /dev/sda3 16384
	(actually it complains here since my swap wasn't quite 16M)
# swapon /dev/sda3		
	activates the swap
# setup
	this is that cute console colorful menu program (uses a standard
	linux program 'dialog') where you install the slackware disks. 
	You make a boot floppy in the end, from which you can
	boot. You can also use some version of LILO on your MBR
	(master boot record), but I haven't done that (modifying MBR
	is always dangerous for the faint of heart!)

	Somewhere along this 'setup' program I got the question if I 
	wanted DOS to be mounted. So I did, made it /DOS, and later
	I noted an entry in my /etc/fstab file to this effect.  You can
	always add this in the end, the entry would look something like
	this:
	
		/dev/hda1	/DOS	msdos defaults 0 2

	or mount it manually for this session:

		mount -t msdos /dev/hda1 /DOS


# reboot


        this will boot you into your new linux. If something was wrong
        during this boot/root/setup procedure, you may have to go through
        it again.
        Assuming you made a fresh boot floppy of course, you need to have
        that ready. You can also take a risk and use LILO.