I have not bought yet. What is the best version of linux is the best for ease of use
 

I have seen soo many different versions of linux on ebay and am kinda lost as to which I need to buy. I want to partition a 80 Gig hard drive and have a dual boot system because I need to run AutoCAD in Windows. Is there anyway to run AutoCAD in Linux?

Well, here we are again ...

No big differences for what you want to do. Take any one which installs easily. I use Mandrake, but people are equally happy with debian, suse or fedora. There is just not such a big difference.

And, if you want to give a try, you don't need to buy them (at least at first), you can just download them, burn CDs and get them installed. Search in this forum to know how.

Finally, in principle, you can execute windows program from inside linux (whatever the distribution) : use "wine". However, it is not always straightforawrd and for some soft, asks for tinkering. There are also commercial soft (based on wine) which can handle the task.

If you buy, try to get the box from the distro maker. That way you know they are the ones getting your money. That will give you the warm fuzzy knowing you have spent your moeny on future development isntead if with an ebay power seller. Save your ebay $$$ for hardware or software that normally comes with a price tag (you know, stuff that's not really legal to use without purchase).

Just a suggestion. You don't need to follow it.

moving to distro forum with the other 100,000 'which distro for me' posts

thank you, I plan to try and find my local linux group if I can get a connection there.

Win4lin is cheap and lets you run win 9x on linux and saves a lot of rebooting. Don't know if it runs autocad tho... You'd have to check with the win4lin guys first.

thanks I will look into that. I might look for linux drafting programm

mandrake 10 official and suse 9,1 are both very user friendly distributions that are good to start with :)

thanks, are the versions available on ebay good and self loading or is it hard to load?

If they're official sets, they should boot in any machine that'll boot off your cdrom. If the vendor has burnt the copies, you'd better get a no DOA warranty (or forget about them entirely and get your set from a place like cheapbytes)

thank you, I am looking for a local linux group to get some help

If you need help doing that, try www,google.com/linux and search for "<your city> LUG". That term seems to give the most relavent and quick results.