[CORed]

I've been using SUSE for a few years and I like it. I started with 9.0 and I am currently running 10.0. I've heard mostly good things about Ubuntu but I have no personal experience with it. SUSE's installer will resize partitions and will set up dual booting for you.

Trying a live CD is a good suggestion. There are also two alternatives to dual booting to consider: Virtual machine software, or putting Linux on an old PC networked to your Windows box. Both of these options will allow you to run both Windows and Linux software without rebooting.

I have worked with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (similar to Fedora, but you have to buy a support contract to get it) on a web server at work, and I like SUSE a lot better. The GUI configuration tools in the Red Hat are mostly inferior to those in SUSE. Of course, real linux geeks just edit the config files in vi anyway.

If you got the repartition and dual boot route, be sure to do a complete backup first. If something goes wrong, you will be glad you did.

If you dual boot, create a 1 or 2 GB FAT32 partition. Both Windows and Linux can write to this.