A Microsoft Free life on a PC….Installing a new OS….?

I have an out of the box laptop (compaq…789 MHz, 384 MG RAM), and I am most satisfied with what I have, except for the whole Microsoft thing…I am already using Firefox, Thunderbird, and Open Office (love them all)… But I want to stop using XP, and start using a Linux…so the questions are:

a) which Linux product? I have no special needs. I just need an OS that do the normal everyday operations of a normal person with a laptop.

b) How do I do it? Should I split up my harddrive (how?) Should I scrap XP on the whole? Do I need to reinstall all of my programs and drivers to meet the new OS? In short, I am a dummy when it somes to this, and want to make sure that I am not shooting myself in the skull when I am just trying to scratch an itch…Thanks…

Do I have to reinstall windows to install linux?

To dual boot.

In other words, will I have to format the hard drive?
I know that.

But do you know the answer to my question?
ALSO:

How much do you space do you think it would take to install Linux with bootloader?

Linux installation ?

I need to install Linux on my PC which already has WindowsXP. I turn on the PC with the Linux CD inside and, when the installation guide(or wizzard or else:) says that it wants to shrink partition /windows/D (it’s actually /dev/sda5) and create the swap partition, the root Linux partition and partition for /home, I tell it to shrink /windows/E instead (and I adjust the other partitions accordingly).

Then an error while resizing partition E (/dev/sda6) turns out saying:

“Opening ‘/dev/sda6′ as NTFS failed: Operation not permitted. The NTFS partition is hibernated. Windows must be resumed and turned off properly, so resizing could be done safely.”

What does this mean ??? Isn’t Windows already turned off, cause I power on the PC and while booting the system reads the installation CD ???

This is the first time that I try to do such a thing so…. :) help ! :)

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