Quote Originally Posted by ixalarx
Sorry about the short time between the two posts, I was kind of agitated at the time. At this point, I've acquired Partition Magic 8 and have made a 2 GB swap and 13 GB ext3 partitions, and plan to make 3 GB of the 13 GB one a root partition (this is done during the install, right?) thanks a lot for the help.

EDIT: And the other partition is a restore partition that came with the computer, in case you were wondering.
You really don't need 2 G swap, 2G is almost enough for a whole install!. 3-500 Meg is LOTS, especially if you have a decent amount of normal memory.
The knoppix operating system should have about 4-5Gig, about 50% of this will actually be used. You CAN run with as little as 2.3 Gig but you have to purge out unused apps as soon as you install & be very careful about cleaning up & not wasting space.
I would set up a substantial amount of space for a vfat data partition & move all data to it (including data now on windows C) Both XP & Linux can read/write to a vfat drive so they can share the data drive and you NEVER want to have data on the same partition as your operating system, Windows, Linux or any other. Operating systems sometimes crash & all that irreplaceable data is history if you have a bad crash.