Right now im running windows xp home edition, but after fooling around with linux live cds, I am looking into installing a hard copy of it. My windows system is on a 200gb SATA hdd, and I have another 120gb HDD which is virtually unused. I don't want to dedicate all of the second hard drive to Linux, so how much would you recommend partitioning? Would a 20gb partition be sufficient? Also, if I installed it on a separate partition, would it be safe to write to the NTFS drive? I know there are many problems which may arise from writing from linux to a NTFS drive when working with windows files, is it still risky if I write to a dedicated knoppix partition?

On a second note, I've also been experimenting with Knoppix s-t-d. I knoppix, my ethernet card is automatically detected and I can immediately connect to the internet, however, in s-t-d, my card is not detected. I tried the pppconf utility, but I'm not exactly sure what to do. The drivers on windows are "Marvell Yukon 88E8001/8003/8010 PCI Gigabit Ethernet Controller," so wuold I have to cross my fingers and hope these are included in the std package?

Thanks in advanced,
Austin