[West Texas Chuck]

Not yet, I’ve been working with a copy of Red Hat that is bootable (came with my Linux for Dummies) but it is so old and out of date that I gave up. I’m wondering if I might need to flash the BIOS to a newer version or something.

[slowhandluke]

By the way, the default boot setup for the latest linux is to setup a dual boot environment, so both systems would be available.

[Calvinist_Dark_Lord]

Not yet, I’ve been working with a copy of Red Hat that is bootable (came with my Linux for Dummies) but it is so old and out of date that I gave up.

Ok, first thing you need to do is get an up-to-date Linux Live CD/DVD.

In order to get a feel for Linux, i recommend that you go onto your Windows system, and 'burn' an ISO DVD of the most recent version of Knoppix...this presumes that the machine you want to install to has both a DVD drive and the ability to boot from it.

Then you would burn an ISO of the Live CD/DVD of whatever version of Linux you wish to install.

The reason you want to test out a Live CD/DVD version first is to determine if you'll have any hardware issues BEFORE you install.

i run OpenSuSE 11.1 on this computer,and have had no problems. It took about 20 minutes to install. i'll soon be upgrading to OpenSuSE 11.3.

Remember though, Boot from a recent Live CD/DVD first to make sure that you don't have any other hardware issues.

BTW, Knoppix, mentioned earlier, is very useful to diagnose problems on both Windows and Linux systems, since it can read both file systems.