Hello I am Mike Hughes, I am a newbie that is to Linux. I have fooled around with computers since the early 70's. Anyway, I am wanting to set up a dual boot on my custom built 1.6 gig with 512 of memory Intel Pentium 4 computer. I have been having some boot problems on my current Western digital 40 gig HD. I bought a new 160 gig HD, Western digital and hope to partition and format. I wish to bring over my current Windows set up off the 40 gig HD and then put some distribution of Linux on another partition and possibly have a 3rd partition for files in between. Questions now. Oh, my windows is Windows 2000. Just downloaded all the updates so another reason to try and keep the current install.

1. How big should the partitions be. My current Windows is taking about 10 gig of HD?
2. which distribution is best and why?
3. Is there a good Bible program for Linux?
4. Is there a clone to Page Maker 7.0 that would work on Linux?

Also what would the procedure, recipe be to do this install.

Thanks for any help.

Respectfully Yours,

Mike Hughes, D.Min., Th.D., Ph.D.
303 N. 1st Street
Wilmington, IL 60481
n9gi at icqmail dot com

as far as distros go, you can find as many people praising one as the other, I use Mandrake, if for no other reason than that's the one I've got....... I've installed (in the past) Slack, Caldera, Redhat, Debian...... the list goes on. I like Mandrake for it's ease of install, and it's ability to resize an NTFS partition (which your Win2k probably resides on) during the install. For your install.... set up Linux first, doing a "custom partition" during the install and leave yourself some empty, unpartitioned space on the new HD for windows. After the install, go ahead and use something like "Ghost" to copy your existing windows partition onto the new hard drive. I seem to remember that WD hard drives come with a small utilities disk that may be able to do this for you.. Since you have a huge hard drive, and I assume you won't be running a server, give yourself about 80GB for windows, and 80 for linux.... you shouldn't run out of space anytime soon also.... swap space, be sure to allow some (about twice the space as you have RAM) ie: if you've got 512MB of ram, make a 1GB swap partition on the new drive. Adjust these sizes as you see fit for the "third partition " in the middle ( I guess for shared files.) For the apps...... almost anything available for Windows has a clone available for Linux, just search around (http://linux.tucows.com) is a great source for linux apps.
Hope this helps
Smee