I have been researching a little over the past few days and I found Kanotix, I booted the live CD and I really liked the layout of the layout of it, but now I want to install it and I need to know how to change the file system on one of my partitions to the Linux file system.
Any help would be greatly appreciated

Two possibilities.

If you install Kanotix, it will present you with a partitioning device, most likely with a proposal for where and how to partition for linux. It may or may not want to user the whole HDD.

You may also download and burn a live-cd of Parted Magic or GPartedLiveCD and use it to see and modify your partitions for linux. This may give you a little better view and better control of the process.

If you open a terminal in your linux as root and use the command "fdisk -l" you will see the partitions on your HDD. I would take notes and do a back up before I changed anything.

I assume you want to dual boot with Windows; there are howtos. If you have Vista, you should use Vistas partitioning tool to shrink the Windows partition. Good Luck

See http://www.reallylinux.com/docs/kanotixbeginner.shtml for some simple instructions.

In general, most live CDs have an install icon and if you click on that it steps you through an install procedure.

If you are relying on shrinking partitions which are currently in use for another operating system, defragment it first to allow the maximum shrinking as you cannot shrink beyond the furthest used block.

thanks to both of you, your advice has been very helpful