Which UNIX or Linux with Vista dual-boot?

[Splash]

Where does that fit into the underpants collection?

Is that the sound of a falling shopping trolley?

[Time Bandit]

There is a handy distribution chooser here from Zegenie studios, its asks sensible questions (and is very polite) before giving you a list of options.

I ended up with a choice between Mandriva, Suse and Ubuntu and went for the first for no other reason than I liked the way it looked. But I think that this is one of the strengths of linux - if you don't like one, its relatively easy (and free, if you choose) to try something different. The desktop environments gnome/kde are also massively customisable (kde more than gnome I believe) so again you can experiment until you find what you like

For dual booting I was advised to use a separate physical drive for simplicity which isn't a problem as I have a spare 80GB drive which I just need to empty (keep finding stuff on it I want to keep) before I install.

A quick question, which I hope isn't off topic.

I am currently running XP with 2GB RAM and want to partition the 2nd drive to use a bit of it for a Windows paging file another bit for a photoshop scratch and file and the rest for linux.

1. What size should these partitions be, is 1 or 2 GB each for the paging files OK?
2. Would it be best to format these as two logical drives first using Windows so they are at the beginning of the disk and let linux deal with the unpartitioned space or should linux be installed first?

thanks in advance