a small update on my situation...

["Luke" <god tyler net>]

and a couple more questions...

I was the poster with all the problems on the installation (most of which I
have come to find out weren't caused by faulty installation disk or mistakes
on my part - just lack of research on my part!)  "Talked into installing Red
Hat 8.0" was the title of my last email.  To everyone who replied - thank
you very much for your help.  I apologize for the seemingly stupid
questions.  I spent some time pouring over the documentation and doing
searches on various things, and wound up find the information you guys
referred me too.  Thanks for getting me on the right track there.

If you care to read the latest (and make sure I'm not wrong on anything),
please see near the bottom  Next though, I have a question on the best basic
setup of my system.

Currently, I have 3 partitions.  hda1 is my Red Hat OS (~4 Gigs), hda5 is
the NTFS  partition (no OS, used only as a data partition in the past)
(~9Gigs), and hda6 is the Swap (~886MB)

Now, I know that I don't need a swap file that large (I have 128MB of ram,
is it twice that much that you normally want? What would be the best?
...ah..I'll just see what the Docs have to say...), and I would like to have
a partition that I could read and write files to that is accessible by both
Windows and Red Hat, mainly to store things like music/movie/picture files
on.  Would you recommend a certain way of doing this?

There are a couple ways I figure I could do this, but I don't know if anyone
of them would be right.

#1:   3 Partitions - one for Linux, a smaller one for Win2kPro, and the
largest one for data.  Win2k and the data one would be in FAT32, as to be
accessible for read/write by Red Hat

#2:   2 Partitions - one for Linux, another for Windows2k (FAT32), and store
all my info on that partition.

Now, I have heard that there are things you can do to get access to the
linux file system on a windows machine, if that is the case, would it be
best to just through all the multimedia files onto a data partition
formatted for linux?

Of course, I could be doing this the worst way possible, (and probably am),
so your thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated.

------
The update on my earlier problems.

Unfortunately, I have a winmodem.  unless I can find a driver (I'll be
finding out the chipset of my modem tonight when I go home), I guess that
means duel-booting till I get either an external modem or I'll probably
break down and get cable modem service running again....Thanks for your help
in pointing out what should have been the obvious! :grin:

As far as the partitions - well, hopefully I'll have the ntfs driver
installed and the file system mounted by tonight.  Many thanks to whomever
pointed me to the http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/info/redhat.html link.
I learned more about NTFS in the past couple of days than during the whole
time I had Win2kPro and WinXP installed on my computer!

The MP3 thing?  I should have read the documentation, a simple download and
install and that should be working tonight (::luke beats himself over the
head::).  Yes, I know, stupid on my part.  I suppose I'll learn some day.  I
apologize for the stupid question!

The CD Audio thing...well..not high on my list of priorities..I'll get to it
eventually...

Again, thanks to everyone who replied!

-Luke