First I tried knoppix, which ran fine, detected everything automatically, and made me love linux.

I've been trying to install Debian parallel to WinXP on my ECS A929 (512 RAM, 40gb IBM travelstar, 1.73GHz AMD Athlon, SiS740 Vid card w/ 64MB integrated) When I intalled Win I left 2 gb free, unpartitioned on the HD (more on that later). I put in the woody installation CD, set up the keyboard and a couple of other things and get to the partition for swap file part. It gives me screen with the NTFS partition and the free space. I press down to select the free space and p to make a new partition and everything freezes up. No error, no disk activity, no cd activity, no nothing. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Secondary point is on FIPS. As I said above I only left 2gb free, thinking I'd just play with linux a bit. Since then I've decided I'd like at least 5-10 gb for it (I have an external HD for document/data files). Of course this desktop replacement has no floppy drive, so I can't use the usual way of doing fips from floppy. To make a bootable CD for FIPS what do I need on it? The DOS boot files? WinXP boot files? Linux boot files? How do I go about doing that? Or, do think it might be possible to boot from a Lexar JumpDrive on USB?

Again, thanks a bunch.