As a precursor, I am very new to Linux - I installed Suse 9 on a friend's computer and that is about where my experience ends. So please be gentle.

I bought a used Inspiron 5100 laptop, (2.4gHz, 384MB, 30Gb HD, CDR/RW) and wanted to put on Suse 10.1 with dual boot to XP. But when it gets to the partitioning part of the Suse install, it only lets me completely erase the hard drive or go into expert partitioning (which might as well be in Norwegian). Installing Suse 9 let me actually make a partition with no thought on my part, but I don't seem to have that option here. Any thoughts?

Much appreciated

You have to realise that your goal is not so easy for a newbie. I want you to read first carefully the man-pages about fdisk and to document about partitions, bootloaders and MBR (master boot record).

First you have to make free space on your hard drive for the linux system. You can obtain that space in different ways:
1-Via the windowsprogram PARTITIONMAGIC. This program can shrink your existing winXP partition without erasing the contents. In that way free disk space will appear for installing linux.
2-Erase the entire hard disk. Boot suse 10.1 and make the necessary partitions for winxp, linux-swap, linux-root and linux-home using the expert partition option or using the command fdisk. Install winxp on the appropriate partition. Install suse 10.1 with the grub or lilo bootloader