A couple questions..
 

I'm a newb. I've played with Knoppix in the past and learned a little bit, but not too much in Linux. Well, I downloaded pclinux last night and am running it right now off of LiveCD. Anyways, is there an option like Knoppix had to create a small partition or file on an existing hard drive/partition so that it has local existence to save settings and such?

Would this distro be a good distro to use as my perm linux? I reached my end with Windows after I got a bit of spyware a couple days ago, and decided that I want to run Linux for all my web browsing and boring computer uses, and then have XP on another drive just waiting around for me to play my games and such. Or should I go to Fedora or Suse, something like that?

Is there any way to make WinXP recognize ReiserFS? I'll be buying a 160 or 250 GB SATA drive here soon and I plan on running Linux on that drive. That'll be my file storage drive as well. I'd be keeping a 20GB hard drive as my Windows drive. It'd be kinda nice to still have access to the files on Linux if I had to, but if not..I guess I have to live with it.

Btw, what is PCLinuxOS based off of? Is it a Debian or what? Sorry for the long post!

I haven't used PcLinuxOS, so I can't offer my opinion on it. On installing it, the website makes it seem that there is a graphical installer on the liveCD similar to the way SimplyMEPIS operates. They have a nice installation guide here:
http://www.pclinuxonline.com/wiki/In...ionToHardDrive
According to the website, it began as a fork of Mandriva and uses RPM, but it uses apt as well.

If you are setting up dual-boot with Windows and Linux, I recommend the following:
Both OSes on one drive--~10-15GB for each
Data on a separate drive, formatted FAT32---easily accessible from both Linux and Windows.

If only one drive, then a separate data partition.

With your 20GB drive, 2 OSes will be tight. Use it for Windows, Linux on #2, then the separate data partition also on #2.

One concern: 20GB may also mean old (as in going to fail one of these days) Consider replacing this one.

I have a full Debian Sarge install on a 4gb hard drive with some added programs .
With most newer hard drives it mostly matters what else you want on the drive .
I used a Windows program I downloaded once to read my linux partition ,but I can't remember the name.
Be careful of spyware.
Look for open source Windows apps on sourceforge.

I think I'm going to wait till I get my new SATA drive before going much further. I'm gonna boot everything off that one drive. 15GB Windows partition (NTFS), 15GB Linux Partition (ReiserFS), 1GB Swap Partition (ReiserFS I assume?), and finally the rest in FAT32. Do you think I should format another 15GB portion of my drive for trying out other versions of Linux? Or is it possible to amend the FAT32 portion later to allow a new partition to be created from it? I've never tried doing that, so I don't know.

I have a friend who I've been talking to about all this, so I have my own tech support available if need be, or I can post up here obviously. I'm just going to ditch the other drives. I've still got a ways to go though. He said that he recommended Debian as my perm linux installation, didn't really say why though. I'm not really up on the various distro's out there. Thanks for your help folks, anything else you would bestow on a willing-to-read newb?

EDIT: What do you do to create your /home directory on another partition? I read here in the newb forum that this was good for when I inevitably nuke something I shouldn't have. Or is it something I shouldn't worry about, since I won't be running around as root anyways? :)

Even if you never are forced to rebuild your system due to a mistake, you might want to someday upgrade to the next OS release. If /home is in its own partition you won't have to restore it as part of the upgrade procedure. Even better (if your hard drive is big enough), allocate a second "root" partition that will be currently unused. When you upgrade, put your new OS there, and if it doesn't work you have an easy recovery by just re-booting your old OS (which is still where you booted it from yesterday).

Although I've never run Debian, all of the UNIX variants that I have run (since release 3) have started their install off by allowing you to partition your disk(s) however you like. So given a new disk, I would run the Unix/Linux install far enough to get my partitions set up. Then I would stop that install and do my MSDOS/Windows install in the partition(s) I have reserved for it. Finally I would go back and do my Unix/Linux install into its partitions and make sure my dual-boot was working.

Since NTFS has come out, I leave the Windows OS there, but create a vfat partition for My_Documents (which I also mount under Linux). Adobe and OpenOffice files go there since they run under either OS. Having My_Documents in a separate partition (sort of like /home under Linux) now allows my to upgrade that OS without having to mess with my data files (unless something goes seriously wrong :-) .

Swap space creates it's own fileystem. You don't format the partition you want to make swap space. You just run mkswap. I'm sure you would have figured it out, but I thought I point it out anyway.