i am currently running win98 and want to dual boot between that and linux. i have partition magic installed and was wondering what i need to do with my partitions before i try installing linux. i have 2 hard drives. i want to use boot magic to switch between the two operating systems at startup. do i need to set up the swap partition, etc. beforehand or will the installation do it for me? also, what is the difference between all the different linux distributions? if i have software that came with a red hat box set, will it be able to run under another distribution? thanks for any help.

Partitioning your hard drives is simple. Just make a block of free space on your hard drive (usually about 1 GB is plenty for just Linux). Linux will make 2 partitions, a swap partition (up to 64Mb -- there may be more than 1 of these) and a Native partition. If you're installing Slackware, YOU get to do this >) Then install. If your drive is less than 8GB, LILO won't have any problems dual booting. Actually, if your cylinders are more than 1024, LILO has problems. I JUST got it to work without a boot disk. Redhat, I can't say. I must be masochistic that way or something. Distributions are distributions. That's it. People put together basic Linux in neat packages. The difference is what ELSE you get in those packages. Like I said, I use Slack, but it came with NOTHING!!! Not even Star Office. Take your pick really.

Slackware is a hard distr to start with. Start with redhat ,suse or better mandrake With these distrs you make partitions during installation I suggest 2GB for linux (Mandrake 7.0 full is 1.3GB) Swap partitions used to limit to 128MB but i think that now it is more Opinions about swap part differ I suggest equal to physical memory Only use part magic if you want to "finetune" your partitions Haven't used bootmagic but as stated in previous post lilo runs just fine (<8GB)