What's up everyone, I've been planning to switch over to Linux for a LONG TIME.

I've never used Linux on my box, I have Windows XP now on my 40GB HD.

I wanted to keep the Hard Drive w/ XP for now, and install the second Hard Drive with Linux on it.

Here are my questions:

1. What is the most Optimized way to configure this system?

2. Which version of Linux is best for me?
- I want one which has a great GUI, and easy to configure(fast).

3. When installing the new Hard Drive, what needs to be done first before installing the OS?
-Setting up IDE, Jumper settings.

4. How will these two separate drives, with two separate OS's be able to interact with each other?
(i.e. while in the Linux HD, can I read/write/execute/transfer files from the other drive?)

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I was hopping to download a full version of Linux online, burn it, and install.
Which one though? (Red Hat, Slackware, Lindows?)

Welcome to LQ.

1. Dunno - what hardware do you have?
2. Mandrake/Fedora/Linspire/Xandros - check Our Review Section or Distrowatch.
3. Make the new hd the slave hd.
4. Windows can only see Linux if it has the Explore2FS program installed. If your Windows hd is NTFS, Linux can only see it if it has support compiled in. But that is very experimental and could result in data loss (and it's read only). Since both Windows and Linux can see and write to FAT32 partitions, create a FAT32 partition for exchanging files.

Put Lilo or Grub on the Master Boot Record (MBR) of the first drive. Good luck.

and start doing some SERIOUS reading on Linux and on the distrobution BEFORE you begin playing with it. Trust me, you will thank me later for it.

For good reading material - check the links in my signature. RUTE has helped all sorts of people.

I'm a new user as well. been playing around with Knoppix for a while (6 mos) and decided to get a Linux HD in my box as well.

I tried first with Debian, because Knoppix is based on Debian... and I do NOT recommend it for newbies, very hard to install... in fact i never got it working. then i tried SuSE 9.1 and got it working good, but it didn't have the things I wanted in my Linux Box, so now I'm on Mandrake 10 and loving it, it was a snap to install, and it has everything I got linux for. it also looks really good if your using KDE (haven't tried gnome, i love KDE too much).
installing new programs in Linux is a little wierd with the whole compiling thing, but other than that, it's cake. just make sure you KNOW which hard drive is which (you'll be configuring hdb if you only have one in now (hda) and the new one is for linux.), else you'll kill your XP. The install sets up your bootloader for you, and theres an option that pops right up when you first load into Linux to edit your bootloader so that you can set XP as your default (Sorry Linux).

so... long story short, i took everyone's advice and tried a few distro's, then settled (so far), on Mandrake 10 and love it. It's easy, feature rich, and good lookin.