Midge,
The best way to learn . . . is to do!
Try this:
- repartition your hard drive with FDISK if its big enough to install both linux and windows (since you're running XP you will need a couple of GIGs on the first partition. XP is also intelligent enough, finally, to allow you to just format one partition on a drive).
- install windows on the first partition
- install linux on the second partition (at the end of the linux installation you will be asked which partitions you want to be able to boot from and it will more than likely recognize the windows partition automatically. If not, you may have to tell it to boot off of /dev/hda1)
- Then dual boot into linux all the time and use it for everything you can... for what you don't know how to get working yet, that you need to use right away, just reboot into windows temporarily.
This will help make the transition not so difficult and frustrating.
One of my setups at home is this:
- 15 Gig hard drive partitioned into 1 - 10Gig partition for windows XP installed with the NT filesystem (which linux cannot read at present) and the other 5 Gigs is for documents (formatted FAT32 so it can be read by both NTFS and Linux).
- a 4.3 Gig hard drive (the slave drive) contains RedHat 8.0 where the 2nd partition is automatically mounted as /mnt/backup upon boot.
The only reason I did this setup was because we left off our cable modem for a while to save money and began using a dial-up connection to NetZero, which apparently has a VPN connection established from the server we dial into, so the auto-chatting in linux doesn't work with it. Even my wife is amazed at how much linux is improving, especially since BlueCurve (RedHat 8.0) and actually likes using it more that windows!!!
Hope this helps...
