[wellylug] Partitioning, Fluxbox and modems (again)

[Nick Jensen]

1) OK, since I asked about what distros you guys recommended, I've managed 
to download Slackware 9.1 (about 3 overnighters with my 56k modem, I only 
got the first 2 disks, not the source code disks), and have installed it on 
an extra 4GB hard drive I had lying around. I'm having lots of fun with it, 
but I'd also like to try Debian.
So I now have 2 drives, a 4GB drive with Slackware installed (taking up 
about 2 thirds of the space) and a 20GB drive with Fedora installed. The 
Fedora drive has a 100MB boot partition (a bit bigger than it needed to be), 
a 200MB swap partition and the rest is a single partition containing Fedora. 
This is a waste, as Fedora is only taking up a couple of gig. I would like 
to reduce the Fedora partition to about 5GB, so I can use the remaining 
space for some other experiments - eg Debian.
Is it possible to shrink a partition without losing the data on it? I would 
rather not delete the Fedora partition, because I have played around with 
the settings alot and I don't want to re-learn how to configure things like 
grub, bash, emacs and so on.

2) I've been trying some smaller windows managers than KDE and Gnome since 
my linux machine is quite slow, and I quite like Fluxbox so far. But I have 
an annoying bug that seems to close Mozilla when I start kppp, and once kppp 
is running, Mozilla won't load - has anyone heard of anything like this 
before? I can use the two on Blackbox or KDE. Is there a better way of 
connecting to the internet than kppp? This was the first connection tool I 
managed to actually get a working connection with (on Fedora), and so I've 
just stuck with it up til now.

3) And that brings me to my third problem of the day. I have a Dick Smith 
HaM 56k modem (can't remember the specifics, but it's easy to find on the 
Dick Smith page), which I managed to get working on Fedora using a driver I 
found somewhere (recommended by someone on the wellylug list, but I can't 
remember who, or where the driver came from). In any case, the driver was 
designed for Fedora Core 1.0, and worked fine.
But I haven't been able to find any drivers specifically designed for 
Slackware, so I've used a generic "linux" driver. This seemed to work, and I 
was very excited for about 3 minutes, after which I got a message from kppp 
saying "ppp Daemon died suddenly". This happens every time, and since the 
modem is the same one I use with Fedora, I figure it must be the driver?
Does anyone have any idea where I can get a working driver for Slackware - 
and later for Debian?

Thanks in advance for your help -

   Nick

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