like cheyenne said, whatever you want.

I'm not sure what linux skill level is, but Mandrake and RedHat seem to be popular among the new users.

i'm not sure if the system you're dual-booting is a laptop or tower, but if you can, put the OSes on seperate drives. Not only do you give each OS more space, but I think you'll see a small performance difference by using 2 drives. Granted you have the extra hard drive and space for it. If not 2 partitions would work.

I actually run both solutions. My Dell desktop is dual-booted with Windows 2000 Pro and RedHat 7.3 (yeah...yeah...yeah, I need to upgrade ) each on their own drive. My laptop is triple-booted with XP Pro, RedHat 9 (soon to be either Debian, BSD or Slack) and Windows 2000 Pro, that's all on ONE 40GB hdd. Granted the laptop is a 2.08Ghz machine and the desktop is 1.5, but I do notice a difference between the system with two hdd for the OSes and the laptop.

just my $.02 for free