[Wolves] Need some help!

[Matthew Warwick]

Hi Helen, and welcome!

The first thing is, the topic on partitioning disks or adding another
hard drive. You can do either 2 things. Either partition a hard drive
into 2 parts, one for Windows, one for Linux, or you can, as pointed out
previously, purchase a 2nd hard drive to put linux on. Obviously, buying
a new drive will get you more space ;) However if you don't have the
money, or have plenty of hard drive space to spare, partitioning will do
just as well. If you imagine that you split the drive down the middle
(so if you have a 60 gig drive, you make 2 30 gig partitions) It would
(basically..) act like you have 2 30 gig hard drives in your machine (I
know that's a very simplified view, but if you think about it like that
it makes things simpler). In fact, with mandrake, during the
installation process there is a wizard which will allow you to resize
your windows partition and then it will automatically partition the rest
of the drive ready to put mandrake on it!

Whichever way you go, the installer will install a little program into
the boot area of your drive, and whenever you boot the PC up you'll get
a menu asking what OS you want to run :)

Running a dual-boot system is definatly the best way to go if you have a
lot of software which won't run in linux, although there are projects to
get windows progs running on linux (WINE being the one that jumps to the
front of my mine) they can still be flaky with specialist progs at
times, so running them in windows would be your best bet.

You also asked what an ISO is. It's basically an image of a CD that you
can download off the internet and burn it to CD. Most linux
distributions can be downloaded as an ISO, its just a single file
containing all the info that's on the CD.

See ya!
Matt