Just ordered mdk 10.1 power pack,don't know a thing about linux. I have some very basic questions like is it pronounced li- nex or lye- nex . I want to partition my drive before it arrives. It is 80gb,the first 25gb has xp installed then 1g for swap. The rest is unallocated. I have Norton partition magic 8,how much space should I leave for mdk,what file system should I format for,what size for swap and format? Does the swap need to be on it's own partition? What does x586 mean and how do I know what I have? I have a win modem and use dial up,graphics card nvidia GeForce 2 MX400. Will these be a problem? Answers to any of these question will be a help. Thanx.

Mandrake comes with a very nice graphical partitioning tool--if I were you, I'd use that.

I understand that winmodems can be problems for linux, hopefullly others here can expand on that.

Otherwise, you may want to back up your data just in case something goes wrong on install.

1) Try "Line-ux"
2) Is that 1gig for WinXP's swap? Linux will want a seperate swap partition, for you about 512megs (usually double ram up to 512megs).
3) Mandrake has an excellent partitioning tool which will help with your install. You should leave partitioning up to it, but decide if you want any space to be FAT32 so both Windows and Linux can read and write to it.
4) i586 means about a Pentium2 class processor or above. Basically Intel x86 architecture as all common pcs are. An AMD or Intel CPU >~200Mhz should do fine, dont try on a SPARC or Mac.
6) nVidia have a great driver for linux, and the PowerPack version of Mandrake might even include it (I think it does, iirc my 9.0 and 9.2 ones did. Good choice btw ). Even if not, you'll have a working non-3D accelerated system and can quickly install the latest drivers to use OpenGL.

Ho-kay. I'll bite. For the absolute, unarguably correct way to pronounce "linux", see here, where you can download a wav/mp3 of Mr Torvalds pronouncing the word. And he, if anyone, should know...

I felt kinda dumb asking this question,obviously I'm not the only one who didn't know. Thanks for the info. Yes. Will this interfere with the other partitions on this drive? How much should I leave,on the same partition or should I build a different one a different one? Thanx.

This is what i would do with a spare 54GB:

Linux swap (which requires its own partition): double your RAM but no more than 512MB. The 'double your RAM rule' was important whem RAM was at a premium but not so much now. I have 1.25GB RAM and a 512MB swap partition. The system _hardly_ever_ needs to make use of it. Don't worry about the filesystem, it is set automatically.

You can do a full, complete install of Mandrake in 5GB, I'd suggest that amount as '/' (the root partition), go with the default filesystem, which is ext3.

Depending on the amount of personal data you keep, the same again for /home, on its own partition, default filesystem is ext3.

For a FAT32 partition readable by both windows and linux, again it depends on your needs. I would suggest at least 1gb so you can fit an ISO on there.

Then you still have loads of space for any other storage, other distributions and so on.

Your modem *may* be problematic. Search the forum if you get stuck. Or buy an external serial modem - guaranteed to work.

Your graphics card - no worries. A bit scary to install the driver if you've not done it before; again search here and read nvidia's documentation - its actually very good.

Mandrake's partitioning tool will only mess up other partitions *if* you tell it to