I obviously can't go complete linux, so I'm going to dual boot with windows.

Here are some things i'm looking for in a distro.

1. Ipod/Itunes. I have a massive music collection and I love my ipod.

2. I love to customize, so I want a very customizable distro in terms of style, layout, graphics etc..

3. Awesome graphics and design. I want to be able to change the graphics and layout on the fly. I'd like stunning visuals etc..

4. If I want to compile something, i'd like to be able to compile it etc.. I don't want to go searching for stuff to do basic things.

5. I need to do all basic things like burning cd's, watching dvd's, playing music, using open office etc.

Hopefully on the debian side. Because I hate rpm's.

What I'm looking for is a multimedia distro with stunning visuals.

And if I have an 80gig hardrive, i'll put a 10gig windows partition.

And a 70gig Linx partition. But how big should the swap be?

Thanks for your help.

Why is that obvious??? Many of us are 100%
Disclosure: I am only at ~95% at the moment....


Better solution:
10G Windows, 6-8G Linux, 20G shared data, and the rest unpartioned (saved for future changes)
BEST solution: Buy a 2nd drive to used for shared data

Swap becomes less important as you RAM gets larger--many say that it is not needed at all if you have 1GRam.
I'm lazy--I always set SWAP to 1 GB--I know it enough, and its not a huge percentage of the total space.

Yeah ok. I've got 1 gig of ram so I won't really bother with the swap.

I can't quite go complete linux yet.

Unfortunately linux lacks in areas that windows succeeds.

Such as drivers, games, ease of use for the nubs.

I'm pretty familiar with linux. Just not the gui. I've really never done kde or gnome.

I've just done straight CMD.

So any ideas for distro choice? I'm looking at zenwalk right now.

Most installers will complain if no swap partition is setup. If you have 1GB of RAM and plenty of hard drive space, I'd say 512MB or even 256MB is not going to hurt and might be a good idea to setup *just in case* as there are benefits to having swap, even if it's not being used.

Install several and try them out, this is your choice to find the one that suits you, not ours.

I personally recommend KDE + the apt/synaptic package system---eg
Kubuntu
Mepis
PSLinuxOS
Debian

The best Linux distro is the last one you try.....

I'm looking at things like

Zenwalk
Elive
DyneBolic
Peanut Linux
DreamLinux

Basically anything with extreme eye candy and multimedia.

And if you use XFCE, Gnome, KDE.

How easy is it to install different themes like in windows?

This isn't any particular distro though. Although some come with the tools and utilities already in place, it really depends on the Desktop and Window Manager you choose to use, which almost any distro can use..

I recommend Gentoo.

Lol. Gentoo?

No i don't think so.

You could have had at least three different distros installed by now---just pick one and go for it!!!

Distro: Debian.
GUI: Gnome. Easy theme manager and can go here for the latest themes, http://gnome-look.org
Swap size: 512Mb min
iTune needs: Banshee project, http://banshee-project.org/Main_Page.

Just my opinion.

Hmmmm... does Debian come pre-installed with multimedia stuff?

And that banshee looks hot.

Ok i've narrowed it down to debian and zenwalk.

The reason why i'm not testing them all is that I need to backup everything on my windows partition first just in case I screw everything up

Why not? .

Eye Candy....

SLED10 comes with Banshee and Gnome desktop manager.
If you've got a decent graphics card you could install XGL.

Have a look at it:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...65514994593432


PS. XGl is not limited to SLED10. You can use it on basicly any distro.