Hi; Great news. SuSE 8 (pronounced Soozza) is very cleaver at installing along side Windows. You hard drive must not be formatted with NTFS or it won't work (you will have to repartition manually, perhaps sometime in the future Microsoft will release the specs for NTFS). If you get the professional version you get the best manuals available for any linux distro (and better than most books). You will need several gigabytes of space on your hard drive (you get loads of stuff including some games... sorry, I mean stress testing programs:-) YaST will shrink your Windows partition (so defrag Windows before hand so move all of the free space into one place) and, make 3 new partitions from this new space, a boot partition, a swap partition (like a swap file in Windows but using a whole partition instead) and the root partition (you can have more, it's all in the manual, but for now it's best to keep it simple). Note, the purpose for the boot partition is that the BIOS cannot boot a PC from anything on the hard drive past a certain place (1024 cylinder) so the boot partition needs to be near the start of the drive. Do you know about primary and logical partitions? Have a look around the net. If you know the basics of hard drive structure then you will have an advantage. I had some trouble connecting to the web after I installed SuSE 8. I fixed it but if you have any problems e-mail me, or subscribe to on of the many linux newsgroups. Try alt.os.linux.suse or, the mailing list suse-linux-e@suse.com (both of which I'm a member and are very helpful, the mailing list is run by SuSE and you can subscribe from the support section of their site. Warning, the list gets you about 100 e-mails per day. Set up a filter on your e-mail program to filter the list post into a different directory). Do you have an internal modem. Is it a win-modem. You may have trouble (although this might have been fixed. There is a lot of old sites around still). Have a play around, if you get stuck ask. The best support is the mailing list or newsgroup. The second best support is me:-) The third is SuSE themselves (you get 90 days free support with the pro version).
P.S. Soon to join the penguin brigade...
Yes I have a penguin cuddly toy (I have two, a big one and a smaller one). The linux penguin is called Tux. -- --------- Darren Harmon http://www.darrenharmon1.uklinux.net