I am thinking about installing Suse 9.2/3 or Fedora Core 4 and Winxp on my IBM Thinkpad laptop,

Heres my configuration:

IBM Thinkpad
1.7 M Centrino Processor
1 GB RAM
60 GB HDD

My plan is to have like 4 parititions, well 5 including linux swap

1: FAT32 Winxp partition (15 GB) - primary and bootable?
2: Linux partition (type: ?) (10 GB) - logical and non-bootable?
3: FAT32? Winxp Documents sharable in linux (15 GB) logical
4: type: ? for linux data, sharable to win xp (15 GB) logical
5: 512mb linux swap logical

Im bit confused about which partition to make bootable and stuff, Please help me figure this out, also am i doing the right thing in making 4 partitions and stuff?

Thank you.

Assuming that you have not installed Windows yet ...

1st: Install Windows XP using the desired partition size
2nd: Create a partition (FAT32) for the Windows data. This can be accessed from within Linux
3rd: For your Linux partitions, create the following partitions ...
1: /boot - 256 MB to enable you to boot several distributions of Linux if you like
2: / - size depends on your distro. In my case, I use Mandriva Linux and 5 GB
is more than enough to hold all my preferred software packages
3: /home - to hold your user files and individual settings
4th: Since the varied filesystems available in Linux cannot be accessed by bare Windows, you will
need a third party software/driver to access the Linux partitions from within Windows.
A good FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) is the "explore2fs".
5th: Enjoy!!!

5 partitions, yes, right thing to do. WHich one is bootable doesn't really matter, here's why:

I recommend Fedora Core 4, as SuSE has had a few dual-install problems in the past and still uses LILO instead of GRUB as a boot loader... I think GRUB is a little superior at this point.

I just did the same thing a few weeks ago with FC3, and just upgraded to FC4 on a Panasonic laptop. Here's how I layed things out:

hda1 (hd0,0) 10gb, NTFS (or VFAT/FAT32 it doesn't really matter) <-- This is where WinXP gets installed
hda2 (hd0,1) 20gb, VFAT <-- This is where all my third party software, games, saves, pics, music, etc. go for WinXP. since its VFAT, Linux can read it without a kernal addition or recompile, since allcommon Linux kernels support FAT32 at the present time by default
hda3 (hd0,2) 10gb, ext3 <-- This is where Fedora Core is installed
hda4 (hd0,3) 19gb, ext3 <-- This is the drive that mounts to /home. It serves the same purpose as the documents/games/saves/music partition for WinXP. If you put /home on its own partition, you won't lose user data if you commit to a fresh install of a new Unix OS, can't lose stuff when you upgrade within the same OS series, etc.
hda5 (hd0,4) extended, swap, 1.5gb <-- This is obviously the swap partition...

This is just a rough plan. I actually have an 80gb instead of a 60 like you do, so I hda1 and hda3 are 15 gigs, but you should do fine with 10 in each.

Install Windows first, and don't worry about partitioning everything just yet. Make sure you do not make the first partitoin where Windows is going to go larger than 10~15 gigs, though. Once you install WinXP to a partition, leave that one alone.

Second, restart with the FC4 disks in, and run thruogh installation. Make sure that the partition plan that I laid out here is the one you wind up with. Let the FC installer do the formatting and final partitioning. By the way, in the graphical installer, you will have to specifiy that you want to "manually partition using Disk Druid" I think it says...or something to that effect. This will let you lay things out exactly as above. As far mount points, you must identify a root partition (this is what you were asking about "which one should be bootable"), this simply means which drive you are identifying as mounting at "/". This is the one that will get FC installed to it. Your Disk Druid screen will look something like this:

Disk Format MountPoint
------------------------------
hda1 NTFS <none>
hda2 vfat /WinXP
hda3 ext3 /
hda4 ext3 /home
hda5 extended, swap

That's not precide, and you can change the "/WinXP" thing to whatever you want. What that means is that you will just do "cd /WinXP" to get to that vfat WindowsXP drive. Under Linux you don't have drive letters and silly things like that. It is all "mounted" or naturally integrated into the files system without any bulky things like drive letters. So when you look at the "/usr" directory, you'll just be at "/usr" not at "e:\usr" or anything like that. You won't ever feel that you're moving between partitions or drives, ever. So, my point about "WinXP" is that you can make that directory name whatever you want, but you won't ever see a drive letter letting you know you're on that drive. This seems a little weird to newcomers, but it makes a lot more sense once you get used to it.

Hope this helps. If you have any more questions, just let me know.

By the way, accessing a "Linux" partition from Windows is not a real issue, as you can natively use a vfat partition for Linux, or make everything vfat if you want. vfat is not very good file system, however, so I would stick with the partition plan above, and anything you want to work with from both Windows and Linux put on the /Winxp part of your computer (As seen from Linux, the E: or F: drive as seen from Windows). Again, with no drive letters to contend with in Linux, you won't notice any difference between a mounted vfat partition and an ext3 partition. You could make /home vfat if you want, it doesn't matter. You won't feel it as a user.

Thank you very much guys for the information, it was the exact information I was looking for. appreciate your help.