Installing Linux, ran into a few problems

[Him]

I just got Slackware 10.1 and I'm having some difficulty installing it. I keep getting the run around when trying to activate my partition and make my swap file, it's rather confusing. I have a 20gb drive (large enough) and 256MB ram (more than enough) could someone tell me right quick what I'm doing wrong?

I go into cfdisk, and make the partition, flag it as bootable, and than write the partition table to it.

Then I go with the mkswap command, and I am all kerfuffled. Not entirely sure what to do next. I did a few things, and apparently they were not right, so it is a moot point.

Help?
Thanks

 

[Him]

AHHH!!!!

I'm really really new to Linux. You may have read one of my other posts in regard to using Windows and Linux on the same machine, yeah, I said screw that. I'm going to just have Linux on this one, but I'm still having problems. I dont think I am getting the syntax right, I also read somewhere to make my swap file first. But whenever I hit the command, I dont klnow if I did the right thing or what. Also, I'm not entirely sure how to partition the drive. Dammit, I'm all spoiled. I'm used to MS holding my hand and making my decisions for me.

 

[Him]

Damn, formatting takes a long time, huh?

 

[Him]

The boot flag would only make sense to set, maybe it's only for systems with more than one drive or partition that has more than one boot sector. Maybe, seems you would know more than me on the subject.

I was checking for bad blocks, waste of time. I restarted and now things are going on. Thanks!