but of course, I've been known to be wrong - CONTINUALLY....

So. I have an in-place working (erm... of course) install of WinXP SP1 on drive C (NTFS physical); data etc on drive D (NTFS physical); a logical E drive (NTFS) with nothing on it right now (resident on C).... and a FAT32 partition on C for linux, at 10+a bit MB.

I have SUSE 9.whatever distro on CD, I know there's a couple of update clicks, which I can download later.

I have an external modem which will work with linux. What else do I need to worry about before I install? And this will be a dual-boot install for a while, until I get comfortable with linux, so keep that in mind....
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Hi Vkaryl. There's a few things to get clear in your mind first.

Partitioning for Linux / SUSE
The first is the actual disk partitioning. You want an empty partition for the linux install, at least 6 gigabytes large. 10 is better.

20 is even better, that way you don't have to change it again.

When gnu / linux installs, it will need a minimum of 2 partitions: 1 for the main os install directory, and the other for the swap directory. Unlike Windows, Linux uses completely separated swap partitions, that's one of many things that makes it faster than Windows, the os never has to worry about finding space for the hard disk swap file.

The standard size for a swap partition is 2 times larger than your ram, but realistically, if you have 1/2 a gig of ram, which is ideal for running Linux with a large desktop like KDE, what SUSE uses, you don't need the swap directory to really be bigger than 512 mB. But make it 1 gig and you'll never need to think about it again.

When you install SUSE, all you need is one big empty, unformatted partition. Keep in mind that hard disks can only have 4 primary partitions. If you need more than that, you have to have a logical partition on at least one of those primary partitions. In other words, if you have 4 primary partitions now, you'd have to convert one of them to be a logical partition container, then linux would just go in and create its own logical partitions.

SUSE, and most other Linux flavors, will create the swap partition by itself, using a built in partition manager, which usually look like a simple partition magic. I think SUSE also gives you the option to create a /home partition, which I would do, that allows you to store your data separately from the OS.

Re /home partitions, it's much easier to create this now than to go in and do it later, so I'd do it now if you are given the option. Unlike Windows, your /home partition will hold all of your user data, configuration files for your programs etc, that's for example where your firefox 'profile' directory would be located.

One cautionary note: you will be asked at one point if you want to let SUSE do the entire install without you doing anything. DO NOT CHOOSE THIS OPTION. It could wipe out your XP. Make sure to do each step manually, including the disk partitioning. It's pretty easy to do, as long as you understand the basic concepts, partitions, boot sectors, etc.

Possible partioning confustion
One thing that might be confusing is that if you have a big blank unformatted partition in the middle of your drive, and then say 3 other partitions, linux will count them like this:

hda1 = c:
hda2 = d:
hda3 = logical container for logical partitions
hda4 = e: , logical partition in logical container.

Then say if the empty partition is between hda1 and hda2, when you create your linux partitions, they will be hda6, hda7, and hda8. hda5 would be the logical container for the linux logical partitions.

Warning: I might be wrong on this one, I can't remember, the empty one could be called hda2 even though it's empty. Then the logical partitions would be the same, 6, 7, and 8.

Linux and NTFS
Linux has difficultly writing to NTFS file systems, the only distro I know of that can do it safely is Mepis, which uses a proprietary NTFS file system driver to do that function. The others use a kernel level NTFS read / write function, which has issues when it comes to writing, not reading though, that's fine.

Linux and Fat32
Linux handles Fat32 basically as a native file system, there are no issues with this. Using a fat23 data partition is a good way to share data between a dual booting system. Most modern Linux distros will automatically mount any file system it finds, NTFS, Fat32, Ext3, Reiser, Fat16 [what most floppy disks use, and what many usb memory sticks use], and many more, so many it's almost silly, especially when you compare to Windows.

Grub and Boot sectors, hda or hdax
Become familiar with the lingo now so you don't get confused when you install. In Linux, hda is your first hard disk. hdb is your second, and so on. hda1 is the first partition on hda. hda2 is the second, and so on. When you use logical partitions, of course, the primary logical partition container, say the second partition on your hard drive, is hda2, and then the logical partitions it contains would be hda3, hda4 etc. So you couldn't install anything onto hda2 in that case.

When you install SUSE, you have the option to install grub [the bootloader] to either the main hard drive boot sector, or to the Linux partition boot sector. If you install it to the hard drive boot sector your Windows boot loader will be overwritten. Windows will always overwrite anything in the boot sector, it doesn't give you the option, so you have to have windows installed first, then install Linux.

If you install to the partition boot sector, you will need to create a boot floppy during the SUSE install process to be able to boot into your suse. You should do that anyway, no matter what happens, it's a good safety precaution.

If you install to the hard disk boot sector, SUSE will locate Windows XP and add it to the grub boot menu automatically, Linux is smarter than windows in that way. If you ever install any major windows update, say XP SP 2, it will overwrite the grub file, then you have to use your boot disk to boot into SUSE, then you can have grub write itself back to the primary boot sector. That's easy, don't worry about that.

Linux File Systems
SUSE will ask you what file system you want to use. You don't have a choice with the swap partition, that's just the native linux swap file system, but on the /home and / partitions, you will have several choices. Pick reiserfs, or reiser 4 if available. Reiserfs is a good conservative choice now, ext3 used to be the standard, but reiser is more and more common now. Ext2 is pretty much obsolete, don't use that.

At that point, SUSE will create the partitions, format them with the proper file system, then start installing itself. SUSE has a pretty good installer, so you shouldn't have any major issues after that point.

Reboot into grub
After it installs, you'll be asked to reboot. Once it reboots, you'll see a much more pleasant boot manager, grub. Depending on how SUSE is configured, you'll have a few seconds to pick which OS you want to boot into. This can be changed at a later point through various grub configuration files.

KDE
If you have a recent SUSE, you should boot into either KDE 3.3 or 3.4, both are pretty good. I really like KDE, others claim to like Gnome, but I can't figure out why, there is no useable Gnome file manager. KDE uses konqueror for its file manager, but you can install Krusader very easily, that's much better than Konqueror IMHO. It's a bit more powerful than Windows Explorer, dual pane interface etc, but does much more.

SUSE hardware detection
SUSE tends to have very good hardware detection. One of the first things you'll notice is that despite what Windows users babble on and on about how hard Linux is to use, you won't have to install a single driver to get your system up and running, it will actually just work. The one exception is if you are using certain Radeon powered video cards, those can cause major issues, but it's getting better and better now.

If you do have major video card issues, it might be a good idea to try another distro, either Mepis or Kanotix are the best bets I've come across. If you have these issues, I'll mail you those cds, like I should have done months ago... kicks self in head but it doesn't seem to do any good.

If you have more specific questions on any of this, let me know. The only SUSE installs I've done were using their FTP install, which is made to be very difficult, it's the free version, and they make you work for your SUSE, but I think the paid version will have a much more elegant installation process.
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I don't think drivers will be a problem. I have a gig of RAM.

I think I'm going to need to move the stuff on D (physical drive) and reformat just for linux (it's a 40 gig drive). C is 120 gig total. I have a bunch of other drives I could install (everything from 13.5 gig to another 40 gig), assuming the mainboard has cable connects etc. (which, being as it's 2.5 years old, I tend to doubt).

I'll get back to you later - after I move some stuff around and reformat D. And see how everything settles.
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1 Gig of ram is perfect, Linux uses ram much much better than windows, it will basically load itself into ram and run from there quite happily. And quickly, obviously.

Just to be clear then, your D: drive is actually the D partition on disk1?

In windows, disks are in array, so your primary drive is disk0, your second hard drive is disk1, and so on.

In linux, your primary drive is hda, and your secondary drive is hdb.

If you can dedicate an entire hard drive to Linux that's by far the best way to go, just remove all the partitions, so it's blank, then have SUSE install itself onto it.

It would also pay to create a few extra partitions at that point so you can play with other Linuxes, they are all quite different when you use them for a while, so it's nice to have a few extra partitions available to test with.

Once you have your main grub boot loader installed, when you install a testing distro, you don't need to overwrite the master boot record grub stuff, you can just have them write their grub stuff to their partition boot sector, then manually add those distros to your main grub configuration file.
'
That probably sounds intimidating at first, but it's actually much easier than it sounds, especially once you learn how easy pico is to use, that's a command line text editor.
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Yah, D is disk1, a single partition - C is disk0. I'll just make D "linux hda" and that'll be its only function.

I know about pico - just haven't used it much obviously. I had a "windows play version" sometime back....

If I have 40 gig to play with, and a main partition should be 20, then should I set up 2 more 10 gig partitions for other distros if I want to putz with that?
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hda, hdb, sda, sdb and so on
You can't 'make' your d drive into hda, it will be hdb, since that's what it is. However, that doesn't change anything.

hda is the primary hard drive on your primary ide channel. If you have a second hard drive, it will be hdb, and so on.

SATA drives will I believe not be hda, but rather sda, which stands I believe for Scsii Drive A, from back in the day when that's what everything was. Note the logic: Hard [ide] Drive A. I could be, and probably am, wrong about many of these specifics, I've taken a bit of break from this stuff for a few months so this is all off the top of my head. Things like external usb memory sticks etc also show as sdx.

More on Linux partitioning
Linux will tell you what the partitions are, the confusing part is understanding how it sees this. I was going to say it's totally linear, but that's not right, it adds numbers as partitions are added, irregardless of where they are on the physical drive.

The main, and critical difference, between linux and windows, is that where windows will always mount partitions on drive letters, you have no say over what those drive letters will be, until you go back in and change them manually in diskmanager or whatever.

One of my pet windows peeves is that windows makes users think that c: or d: is equal to the hard drive, when all it is is the mount name for a partition. Linux doesn't hide this stuff, so you actually start getting some idea of how your computer works.

Linux, on the other hand, keeps an internal record of its partitions, and you mount or unmount directories on them. So instead of say e: for your data, you'd have, hold your breath... /data. And you could mount /data on any partition you wanted, but it would always be seen as /data in your file system. This is a much more coherent way to mount partitions IMO.

Linux text editors: console: pico
Pico is great, you've probably heard about vi, but that's pretty dense, pico is very friendly, in windows you can't do much with those tools, but in linux you can do a lot with them. That's what I usually use to edit configuration files, although I'll also use kate, which is the default KDE text editor, but then you have to start kate in root mode to edit the file.

Partitioning the linux drive
If you have one 40 gig drive, I'd do it like this:

hdb1 - 1 gig swap - put swap first because that's what will be written to the most, shortest distance for hard drive arm to move.

hdb2 - / - aka root, 6 gigabytes - just a slash. That's where linux proper will be installed, all the os, executables, programs, system configuration files, and so on. Because no data will be stored there, 6 gigabytes is plenty, you can go 10 if you want, but you'll never use it.

/home - this is where all your user data goes, config files, data, etc. 10 gigabytes.

This leaves roughly 20 gigabytes. You can partition that however you want, I'd just leave it blank until you try installing a test distro, you can partition it then with that, if it's two logical 10 gig drives, you can easily install two distros.

Software installation and system updating :: apt-get
One thing with SUSE is it doesn't have apt-get, which is the very best software installation utility for Linux there is. Apt is a true wonder to observe in action. APT stands for Advanced Package Tool. You can read a good debian review here, including more on apt.

All debian based distros use apt, with a gui front end sometimes called 'synaptic'. I couldn't use a distro without apt. All the major ones you've heard of use that, it was created by debian, so all the debian clones use that, kanotix, beatrix, ubuntu/kubuntu, linspire, and many more I can't think of off hand.

This is another ridiculous linux myth by the way, the one that say how hard it is to install software on linux. To install for example the latest firefox on a debian based distro, this is the entire process: open console:

That is literally all you have to do. Compare that with Windows.
Open browser, type in www.mozilla.org
navigate to firefox download, click to download. Save to disk. Open executable to install. Wait for installation process to complete.
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