ok I'm ready to start destroying my windows partition piece by piece. First off I want to use partition magic to shrink all my windows partitions and then use the free space to create a new linux partition.

I can resize the windows partitions with partiton magic ok, my question is - how do I then create a new linux partition with the new free space?

Depending on the Distro (Distribution = RedHat, Suse, Debian) you use The installer of these will have the software to do that for you.

My advice : Plan ahead. Look around at the mount points people use (Theirs lots of advice on this.) and partitions.

\ (Root holds most of the file system) mine 5Gb

\boot (Where the kernel lives) mine 50Mb

\usr (Where most of your software lives) mine 15Gb

\home (Where your documents will live) mine 5Gb

SWAP (For memory swapping) mine 500Mb < Overkill

These are the main ones. Although you can of course get away with a lot smaller, I've got masses of space left on my drive, most of them are only 15-25% Full, and I've got a huge amount of Software.Of course some or all of these mount points (except for SWAP) can all live in the same partition. You Only really need two. \ and SWAP.

if u r going to use partition magic then there is a option to create new drives and there it asks you which OS you want to load. select linux and it will give u options to create swapspace and ext parttion..

better still start installing RHL and it will do it for you by itself...

Red Hat and Mandrake have GUI partitioning tools to do the job - If your going to install one of these, use their tools to do it - with Slackware, Vector and Libranet you can use cfdisk from within the install - again, use the Linux tools for setting up Linux partitions.