hi

some answers/opinions as follows,

how big should the partitions be.... well really this is entirely up to you, personally being as you have 27.9 gigs free I'd make a partition of about 10gigs for linux... this'll give you a reasonable amount of room for both OS's

which version.. again this is really down to personal choice. but Redhat or Mandrake (which is originally based on RH) are what are usually used by those new to linux (I'm using Mandrake 8.1 at the moment for example - tried an earlier version of RH and found it aesthetically not to my liking) some may recommend other variants. I've not used RH 8 but I've heard its reasonably newbie friendly. Since linux is well.... free.... in most cases this allows you to try out several variants and decide whats best for you.

yes this is a good site but also look at

http://www.linux.org
http://www.redhat.com

others will likely suggest lots of other sites... use google to find others

The boot loader that linux installs (usually GRUB or LILO) will give you the options of which OS to load upon boot... this is done as part of the install process and shows when you reboot....normally defaults to linux but this can be changed in linuxconf

yes you will be able to see windows from linux (and linux from windows - IF linux is on a FAT32 partition - if you use Linux native file system ext2 and ext3 then you may have a few more problems)

bit pushed for time so I've prolly missed something out here..... in fact sure I have.... no doubt someone else will pick me up on it

hope this helps


Z



<edit> oh I see I have already been beaten to this .... just to clarify maverick tho'... you can use FAT32 to install linux on... but if you do Linux does suffer quite a big performance hit... it is better to install to linux's native partition if you can