i figured out the boot partition the swap & / usr, home, var and a few i dont know what options is avalible id like to see an ftp partition? this is slack 9.0. also if i'm correct the only primary partition is the boot everything else is logical?

You may have no more than four primary partitions. After that everthing else must be logical or extended. In Slack, you really only need to have the swap and the root (/) partition. On mine, I usually make several smaller partitions (a /usr/local and a /tmp directory along with root and swap). This is because smaller partitions are easier to debug/fsck than partitions which span the entire disk.
For now, I'd recommend you made the swap partition first and make it twice as big as the size of your computer's RAM. Use the rest for your root partition. Set the root partition as "Bootable" and then you're ready to go.
Run setup and everything should be fine from there.

Note: Slackware does not require a partition of about 100 MB to be specifically mounted as /boot (like Red Hat does). You only need to set one of the partitions bootable so LILO can start it from the MBR or from the root disk.

i dont need much swap cuz i have over a gig memory 400 mb is fine by me for swap. i went thru the installation i didnt see other options for partition types other than root and usr. im haveing a kernel panic rite now to fig out but i'm going to do a reinstall now that i'm a little more comfy w/ slack and the text setup. so i'll use your advice except for swap size. thanks