Hi, i was wondering if some kind soul could give me some advice and possibly point me in the right direction i am currently i windows xp home user with, i would say, slightly below moderate knowlege of computers. I am wishing to start a career in computer mantanence which i plan on starting the educational course in the summer to achieve this. I have read around and the course requires as a prerequisite some respectable capability and understanding of the linux operating system (something that i dio not have). So i was possibly planning on installing linux as a dual boot on my machine (atholon xp 2200 with 30gb hard drive master and 80 gb hard drive slave).

Now i was hoping if someone could point me in the direction of achieving this. Would i install on a separate partition on the master drive. And if so how do i achieve this (i currenly have no knowlege of partitions unfortionantly but i have just purchased symentec partition magic) So would i use this to create a separate partition on the C drive. Now if so would i just need to install the linux software and it will become bootable in this new partition or is the process more complex that this. Furthermore once installed how would i choose which operating system was to be booted up do i need a special dual booting piece of software installled on my machine and if so which partition do i install it.

Furthermore can i ask is there just one type of linux operating system or are there different types of linux. If so which is the most popular/highly recommended. Finally once installed how much disk space would the OS and software take up.

Thank You
Anthony

Go for Knoppix live-cd, which doesn't change a thing on the hard drive. This can whit your appetite for Linux. If you wanna install Linux, give SUSE or Mandrake a try. These are very user-friendly and could be a very good starting point for a newbie.

Goodl luck

Yeah, SuSe is good... When I installed it (I'm dual boot too) it automatically assumed that I wanted to dual boot, and automatically set the install up for partitioning my master drive... I actually changed the settings for it to install on my second hdd though!

There are many options for you to choose from and many distros, the major difference between them being package management. Use the search feature here and also read about each individual distribution to see which may fit your needs best. Almost all can install side by side with Windows, giving you a dual boot system. If you've not visited DistroWatch before, it makes for some excellent reading. Mandrake, Suse, and Fedora are easy to begin with--you may want to start there.