I plan on installing Mandrake 9.1 on the same harddrive as XP. It's 80gig and I am currently using up 30gig. Can I have any suggestions of what size my linux partition should be? Please keep in mind I never installed Linux before and don't know how much space it will take up.

i am a newbie too.i installed linux 3 or 4 times:)for a newbie if you don't play games 10gb is enough for all partitions i think ::}::::::::>

You've got 80 gb and your worried about how much to use??? I wonder what you folks would have done back in the day when hard drives maxed out at 10 meg. Geeeze.

Ok, enough harassment. You have plenty of space to run linux, in fact, more than enough space. You can set up a say 10 to 15 gig partition for linux, then I always make a swap that is double the size of my ram, so for you the swap should be about 512 MB. Then with the rest of the drive, you can format it as a Fat32, so that both Linux and Windows can see it, and it can be a stoage place, mp3 and important files. Before you start, what distrobution of linux are you going to use, Mandrake, Red Hat, Another type.

I need to learn to read, Mandrake should at one point during the installation, prompt you to do your partitions. Chose Disk Druid. It will give you a graphical interface to change your partitions, I say don't move or touch the XP partition because Windows is always not happy about other OSs. in the open space make a 10 to 15 gig space, format in ext3 being mounted as "/" (no quotes when you put it in). Then create a 512 partition and format it as swap. Now i think you can make the rest of the drive fat32 in disk druid, if not, when you boot into windows you should be able to do it there. Don't do anything you are not sure of, or if you have data you need, back it up first. You can end up losing everything.

I don't know what you plan to do with it, but if you're just going to play a little with it to learn from it, I'd say 4GB is plenty. I installed suse on a 3GB partition, and never needed extra space. Maybe that's because I don't use it so often yet, or don't use big software like office, but that should be enough if you're a newbie. You can use partition magic, or other software to resize existing partitions, some even without losing your data. If your disk is 80GB, be sure you use a distribution that has support for booting over the 1024 cylinder of the harddisk, but I think most of the big distributions like redhat, suse, mandrake, debian, etc. will support it by now. good luck, don't give up when it's going a bit difficult in the beginning. take the time to read some things about a subject you're having trouble with and you'll get there eventually. Johan