I am about to buy a Dell Inspiron 6400 notebook that will come with Win XP installed. I want a Win/Linux dual OS machine. I have Mandrake 10 on my desktop and am tossing up whether to put Mandriva or Ubuntu on my new notebook. Is Mandriva a good distro for Dell notebooks?
Can anyone point me to (or provide) a step by step tutorial of how to install Mandriva onto a machine with WinXP already on it?
On my desktop I found it easier to obtain dual OS functionality by having each OS on its own hard drive, as I had problems with Win XP meddling with the Linux boot partition without my knowledge when both OS were on the same hard drive. Any help appreciated.

There are two ways to dual boot:
1) configure GRUB/Lilo to boot bothe systems
2) configure WinXP to display a boot select screen and start GRUB/Lilo to boot linux

both options have been dealt with many times and in depth on the forum
for example:How to Dual Boot...

Thanks. I will follow the link and add the info therein to the mix.
I am sure to be back with further issues once I get started.