While you were looking, did you by any chance notice such User-Agent strings as:

Why/Do/You/CareAbout/This/666.13
foo
~
User/Agent

That was me, using wget. I use wget to download individual files (not to spider!), because I like it much better than any graphical download manager. The blocking of it gets kind of annoying. Just my $.02.

I guess I don't see how wget would be eaiser to use than, say, firefox or something (you don't need a fancy download manager to download a 10KB file)

Anyways, wget would probably be abused more than it would be used. Plenty of people would just wget --mirror ticalc.org and not realize that will (1) take forever, (2) kill bandwidth for everybody else, and (3) is overkill for downloading a quadratic solver. :-)

I want to install slackware. I've downloaded the isos and burned them, and gotten to the part of setup where I have to repartition my hard drive with fdisk.

I can't figure out how to reduce the size of the primary partition to make an extended one. Windows XP is on the primary, and it has about 5 gigs free... how many cylinders is that and how can I make sure that I reassign only free, empty space to the linux partition?

A link to an old trial of partitionmagic will do too :)

Also, I was wondering how much space /home requires (I want to make that partition separate and as small as possible) and how much space I should format into a linux swap partition. I have 128 megs of ram an plan on using kde if that makes any difference.

I'm not that knowledgeable about partitioning, but as far as /home goes, that depends on how much space you're going to be using for your personal files.

If you will be storing a few documents and not much else, and there won't be many users on your system, you probably can get by with a couple hundred MB. If you're going to collect huge downloads or edit WAVs or something, you'll need a lot more space (unless you save them on another partition).

Try http://www.sysresccd.org/. Download and burn the CD and run qtparted. It will allow you to non-destructively resize an existing partition. Once you shrink your XP partition, you can create a new primary partition in the free space.

you don't need to know the count of cylinders,
simply type +512M for a 512M partition

This is so untrue, the reason for this is that I have a running windows 3.1 computer right here at home that I use all of the time!!

i actually have a working win 3.1 i mainly use it for work and playing solitare and it actually has internet capabilities but in order for that i need one of those dam removable phone cards like from at&t but i dont think they make em ne more

oh yeah srry for the dbl post but i like linux especcialy on my xbox :) can come in handy i installed it and i telneted between my computer and soon im going to rig up a keyboard and a mouse and ill have my own 8-10 gb server that plays dvd's and games lol ive also installed half-life 1 on it hl2 just wont work :(

In my introduction to operating systems class, one of the things we'd do is install various operating systems on the school lab computers (they had so-called "removable" hard drives, the kind where you turn a key and can pull the hard drive out and put a new one in - so we didn't have to kill the oh-so-perfect windows 2000 installs when we installed the various OSes). The OSes we did (in this order):
- DOS something (I think it might've been 6.22)
- Windows 3.1
- NT 4.0 (and had much fun with service packing, etc)
- 2000 Server
- Red hat Linux (probably spent the most time on this)

But yes. That's right. We put Windows 3.1 on *modern hardware*. This resulted in a very obvious problem: jumpy mouse! Apparently, mice had a lower resolution or something like that in the Windows 3.1, so it was designed for this resolution. Use a modern mouse that has a higher resolution, and you'll have to use the keyboard to get the to mouse "tracking speed" control panel to slow it down!

Too bad we couldn't take it on the internet. We'd have to get it to login to an NT domain for that anyway. This was just plain 3.1, not 3.1 for Workgroups (let alone "3.1 for NT Domains").

Oh, and of course I do believe it had the 386 Enhanced functionality enabled. (Of course it would, the processor does support 386 features, it's a freaking *Pentium*!) I don't think we played with it very much though. We only used Windows 3.1 for one day before we moved on :( .

I don't remember having a mouse problem when I tried Windows 3.1 on a ~700 MHz Celeron laptop. Maybe it depends on the mouse. My problem was that it wasn't incredibly useful, so I didn't mess with it for too long (I had already used Win3.1 long enough in the past). I couldn't get the screen resolution to go any higher than 640x480 (even though my system supported it). Finding drivers for all that hardware that came out long after Windows 3.1 was ditched by most of the world might be kind of a problem, too. :-)

windows 3.1 can't run the internet even if it could it would take like 500 years to do somthing.

Not true - there are some decent DOS browsers (like Lynx).

Ok mabye but it will take 500 years

not if you have a decent modem. oh, and lynx is text only so...that would make it faster

Yeah, it seems like most of the time it takes for a site to load is from downloading any images and rendering the page, not from transferring the HTML source itself.

I Find Windows 3.1 quite Speedy on a Cable Connection
Use The Force....

COME ON PEOPLE HAVE YOU NEVER HEARD OF A "OVERSTATMENT" SORRY I THINK THE WORDS I AM USING ARE TOO BIG FOR YOU!

No, no one really took the "500 years" literally, we were just showing you that it wouldn't be unreasonably slow to browse the Web with Win 3.1, which is what you were saying. What is it with you???

ok sorry for yelling

such violence :)