Distro/Partitioning suggestions?
 

I am completely new to Linux, and I'm looking for something that would run on a PIII 866MHz with 384MB of RAM. It'll be used as a typical desktop computer... IRC, browsing, e-mail, (etc.) and some occasional gaming or development. So pretty much just something that'll run decently for general use on there, and is somewhat newbie-friendly, would be good.

Now, as for my partitioning, I am trying to dual-boot with XP (I'm upgrading from WinME and figured while I'm upgrading I might as well try out Linux) so I'll need some room for that. I have two hard disks on an IDE channel, the first is 40GB (currently one big FAT partition with WinME) which will be wiped clean, and the second is 120GB, which has an 80GB FAT partition for media files (will probably leave as FAT for use with both OSes), a 20GB FAT partition for other misc personal files (doubt I'd even need to read from it with Linux, worth converting to NTFS?), and 20GB left unpartitioned.

Any suggestions for a distro or for how to arrange it and WinXP in that space would be greatly appreciated.

With the 40 Gig available, you have more than enough. Put XP on that drive, before you do anything else.
Too much screwing around otherwise.
Use the unformatted 20 Gig for Linux - don't do anything with it. Some of the GUI installers are a bit funny about that.

Current newbie recommendations seem to be Ubuntu or Mepis. Known distros like Fedora Core (nee Redhat) and Debian will also get votes. Try one of the first two - a quick seartch will get you heaps of hits.

EDIT: Second thoughts, make that unformatted area an extended partition. Then you can use multiple logicals for Linux. Leave the actual creation of the logicals until Linux install time.

Yea I'd say your XP on the 40gb.

And you Linux on the 20gb.

But I on the otherhand would recommend slackware, it's what I started out with and it was a piece of cake, esspecially with the help of this forum :study:

I havn't tried those 2 distro's that syg00 said to try, but I figure those would hold your hand on everything you do.

So I recommend slack because once you get the basics down, your going to want a full fledged, balls to the wall Linux that you can keep around for a long time, and slack is a good solid distro.

I don't know, you slackers are all the same ;)
I use Gentoo, and didn't even give it a mention.

I recently installed both Ubuntu and Mepis for my lady to get her off Win98. Either would do - I settled on Mepis.
Hopefully washuu108 can graduate to a "real" distro sometime.

lol, I wouldn't have recommended gentoo even if I did use it...My burner is broke, so I havn't had a chance to even give it a try, but I here the install is hours of hell.