Well, with much anxiety I am going to try and install Mandrake as a dual booter sharing a 120gb hard drive with xp. I have decided to try Mandrake as my first Linux distro. It's "ease of use" seems inviting to a beginner. I have already partitioned my harddrive.

80gb for windows xp first partition (ntfs)
5gb swap (fat32)
35gb for linux (ext3)

I want to find out if linux is a viable solution to windows. I don't want to support windows if Gates is going to be the overlord of my computing watching over me like big brother and telling me what I can and can't do.

I primarly, play ut2004, open office works fine on windows I am sure it will be fine on linux. Firefox and thunderbird make good alternatives.

What should I use as a dvd/cdrw/cd-r burner?
What should I use as an HTML editor. I currently use webeditor, can I still run it on Linux using an app like wine?
What P2P should I use, I currently use Shareaza, will I still be able to use it on Linux using wine?

Hopefully all will go well.

Wish me luck and Godspeed.

Please supply any advice that might help me in my travels.

Thanks, for all your help in welcoming me to Linux.

Thanks
Kezz

edit: I downloaded 10.1 dvd using shareaza's bit torrent client.

a 5GB swap file????

how much RAM do you have?

usually, swap needs to be a little larger than available RAM, this dates back to when, if in times of trouble you could swap the contents of the RAM into the SWAP file.
I have 768MB RAM and I don't think I'ver ever seen the swap file used.

K3b does the writing of disks and so on. It's a dream to use and has DVD writing as well.

HTML editor - mandrake comes with quanta and scream and NVU is easily gettable in the right format.

P2P - I've used aMule and mldonkey - I don't really do file sharing so can't really answer.

Mandrake is a fine place to start.

Good luck.

i did a dual partition and after a while i found that by not giving linux enough room you are not seeing its true power. now that i have erased windows i couldnt be happier. i hope you have a good experiance also.
it might be tough to get the hang of some of the command line typing but once you do you'll wonder why everyone doesnt use linux.