Whats a good Linux distro for a n00b?
I did this with Mandrake, which is probably the most widely cited “n00b” distro. With regards to partitioning, keep in mind that if your drive is NTFS you’re probably going to lose everything. This is something where you’ll definitely want to do a complete backup before attempting. If you have access to partition magic or a similar program use that, but the linux installer should help you repartition if you don’t. The typical setup for a dual boot is about 20g for the Windows partition in NTFS, 20g for linux in EXT3, 1/2 a gig also in EXT3 for a linux swap, and the rest FAT32. Linux cannot reliably write to NTFS partitions (although you could set up read only mounting) and Windows doesn’t know what the hell EXT3 is, but they both speak FAT32 so you can put your shared files there. Installation with Mandrake or SUSE will not be intimidating… so long as you’re backed up everything, just pop the bootable CD in and give it a go. Any issues you have post installation can be cleared up wit
