Walter, On Tue, 26 Nov 2002 12:26:49 -0500, Weber wrote: > I've gone to "SLACKWARE.COM" and, first, can't find any reference to the > cost of the system. Does anyone have, at least, a ballpark figure for it? Slackware 8.1 is $ 39.95 on http://store.slackware.com As other people have pointed out, the "iso" CD-ROM image can be downloaded for free from http://www.slackware.com. > And, second, a reference document which puts into perspective the various > portions of SLACKWARE, such as telling me what GLIB, TUX, BLUE PILL, etc. > does and why it might be useful? You have to install Slackware for that. Then, use the internal documentation of Linux by entering the following commands: apropos <name_of_program> man <name_of_program> The command "apropos" will list all the information available for a given keyword. The command "man" will display a specific man-ual page for the program name. There is a short documentation on the Slackware site itself, so take a peek at it as it provides slackware-specific instructions and information. Also, it's always a good thing to go to the following site, and download the "beginner" documentation for Linux, which is a good place to start: http://www.linuxdoc.org > And, finally, if I have a machine which has DOS and Windows95 on it, can > I just create a directory from which I can launch SLACKWARE, or do I have to > go to partitioning. Well, I am not really up-to-date when it comes to this, but Slackware has a "ZipSlack" option to install a light version of Slackware on a Zip disk (>100 MB), and I think there are other possibilities, such as UMSDOS, that allow yo uto launch a version of Linux from a directory Finally, in my opinion, unless you are really, really short on money, it is much easier to buy a second-hand machine to install and test Linux than to partition a hard disk and risk losing your data on your work machine. Of course, I have something like 5 machines, so it's easy for me to say this... <grin> Hope this helps! -- Gil Andre ___ Technical writer ___ Arkeia Corporation email: gandre@arkeia.com | web: http://www.arkeia.com _______________________________________________ Blinux-list@redhat.com https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list