Linux Explorations Part 1: Installing Slackware

I've wanted to install a Linux operating system on an old desktop PC for a while. There are many reasons for wanting to do so, but the big one for me is that Linux requires that you learn more about how computers actually work. There are huge communities of users, contributors, and developers for all of the Linux distributions, and they're generally all helpful and willing to offer advice if you ask. Without any experience in Linux operating systems, command line work, or hard drive partitioning (to name just a few of the things I've learned about in the past two days with Linux), I dove in. 

The first decision to make when installing a Linux OS is which distribution (distro) to choose. There are dozens of them, and they range from extremely simple and very Windows-esque (Ubuntu) to highly complex (Gentoo). I wanted something that would force me to step out of my computer comfort zone, without getting too complicated. I went with Slackware, which, in addition to being one of the oldest and best supported distros out there, is considered the most true-to-Linux distro. 

Once I decided to install Slackware, I immediately wasted an afternoon trying to install it from a bootable USB drive. If you ever want to do this, don't. It's possible, but there are so many convoluted side steps and extra programs necessary, it's much better to just use a DVD install disc. If you know what you're doing, it's actually quite simple to do: 

1. Go here and download the relevant install DVD ISO (paying attention to whether you want the 32- or 64-bit version). The file should look like slackware-14.1-install-dvd.iso and will likely take 2+ hours to download, because it's larger than 2gb. 
2. Go here and download ImgBurn (or whatever disc burning software you want to use, but ImgBurn is free and incredibly easy to use)
3. Use ImgBurn to burn the file you just downloaded to a blank DVD (choose the"write image file to disc" option). I wrote it at 4x to avoid write errors, and then verified the disc.
4. Insert the DVD into your computer (I hope you've already backed up all your important data) and power on. 
5. You'll need to edit the BIOS boot order to tell the computer to first look at the CD/DVD drive for bootable media. This usually requires pressing Delete or F2 soon after the computer turns on. 
6. When the computer starts up, you'll get a message like this: 

From here on out, I followed this fantastic guide to set everything up. I have an 80gb hard dive, so I set my three partitions up with 40 for the root, a swap partition equal in size to the amount of RAM (1gb in my case), and all the rest for the home partition. The one place I deviated from the guide was in choosing the type of partitions: I used Linux ext4 for the root and home partitions. 

I set up a local user account and edited the inittab file with Vi (which is complicated, but described very well here) to automatically boot into the graphical environment.

Now that I finally have a working Linux OS, my next step will be to install some packages and get connected to the internet with internet connection sharing from my laptop.