What is linux 8 ?? Do you meant redhat 8? or SuSE 8? or god forbid mandrake 8 (it's very old)?
That clarification may help someone point you in the right direction.
What are you hoping to put where? And what's already on the partitions ?
my current linux distro is mandrake 10 official edition.
My hard drive (a 120 gig western digital model), is partitioned as follows
hda1(primary)=20 gig's for XP
hda2(primary)=1 gig for /boot (which is probably too big, but it seemed a nice round number)
hda3(primary)=1.5 gig's for /swap (which is 2 x my installed RAM of 768 meg's)
hda4(extended) into
hda5(logical)=20 gig's for /root
hda6(logical)=the rest of the disc for /home
Now if you tried say, mandrake, SuSE or fedora(redhat), then you can probably install one of these linux distro's into 1 partition - the only reason why I've got mine split up is because previously I had gentoo installed, which requires a default setup of /boot, /swap and /root.
The three distro's i've mentioned above, are all "RPM" (that's redhat package manager) based, and are "redhat like" in the way they work. But lot's of people consider them "starter" distro's (which IMO is incorrect, as they have all the "bell's and whistles" that so called "power" distro's like debian, gentoo and slackware have).
So, for one of the above, and to have pretty much everything installed, you'd need about 4 or so gig's (there's lot's of packages that you can install). If you think you may need a /swap partition, then it's been common wisdom to have a /swap of double your installed RAM.
You can download mandrake and fedora (i.e. current versions), as for SuSE, until they were bought out by novell, you could only download and older version (one or 2 versions back), the latest one had to be purchased. Don't know about now.
Which ever way, if you download, you'll need a fast connection (or lot's of patience), because for example, mandrake is 3 cd's and about 650-700 meg's a shot!
Alternatively, you could try
knoppix which is a debian based "liveCD" version, it will run from a cdrom drive, won't put anything on your hard drive (unless you tell it to - and you'd know if you did), it also has really good hardware detection. You can install it to your hard drive - it uses a clever compression system, so that 700meg cd that you'd have downloaded, uncompresses to about 2.5 gig's (from memory).
Hope this helps a little
regards
John
