Me again.

If I hit F8 when booting up, I can choose to boot from my hard drive, my cd, or anything else that is bootable on my system.

If I have 2 (bootable?) partitions, 1 with WIN 98 SE, the other with linux (I don't know, maybe Peanut or Thiz), can I install linux without a boot manager? That is, can I use the bios boot instead of a boot manager.

If the answer is no, will boot managers (in general) mess with my hardware configurations in WIN 98 SE? My built-in ethernet port and my wireless network thingy don't like each other (sometimes I'd rather not go wireless). So, when WIN is booting, I get a menu asking me which hardware configuration I want to use.

I haven't done the partition thing, but I'm assuming that one partition will be C: and the other will be D:. If possible, I'd rather choose which one to boot with the bios option.

you can use rdev to make the kernel bootable, if you
have some other "bios thing" to make it jump to there.
puttinglilo or grub in the linux root partition is a little easier.

I'm not sure if you'll be able to choose from partitions from your bios. A bootloader shouldn't mess with your hardware configuration:
MBR(Windows configures this to point at the first partition's MBR)>1st partition's MBR(Has stuff Windows needs for booting)
So if you install to your harddrive's main MBR (not a partition's MBR), it shouldn't change the way Windows boots. If you want to reinstall what Windows puts on the main MBR, just boot with a DOS disk and run the "fdisk /mbr" command.