I am sure there is a way to do it when your installing it. I haven't used disk druid for a while, so I don't know exactly what you have to do, something probably like create a partition while having it use all remainning space then right click on it and tell it to be a extended partition or whatnot.
Don't remember for sure.
But that would require you to delete partition 4 and create a new one and make it extended instead of a primary, so your going to loose whatever information you have on it.
If it's a swap partition, that's no biggy. Just delete it. When running multiple instances of Linux you don't have to use a different swap partition for each one, just use one for all of them.
How the OS knows which partition on which drive to use for what is with the /etc/fstab file. You just boot into that and edit the fstab file and change the swap partition line to use /dev/hda2 instead of /dev/hda4, or whatever they are. Then just boot up with the next install disk and delete it, the next time you use the OS it will automaticly use whatever changes in the /etc/fstab you made, no questions asked.
But truth be told, a Linux distro is a Linux distro is a Linux distro. Technically they all are the same, differences happen on the gui configuration tools, how they are initially setup, and newer distros are going to use the technical improvements that happened since the older version was put out. Developement the open source world is very rapid, but changes happen gradually, unlike say MS were you have big abrupt changes every few handfull of years. Some are intended for different audiances, but Fedora and Mandrake are for pretty much the same audiance and Fedora is just a newer version of Redhat. (Redhat recently dropped support for RH9 btw. There are people who support it legacy-wise for server installations and such, but there isn't much reason to use it now if you can pick Fedora.)
If you want to try something different give a *BSD a try.
The BSD's are more closer to the original Unix stuff and are decendents of the original BSD operating system were we got things like TCP/IP and the arpanet, before lawsuites from the commercial Unix side put a damper on things. (they effectively bit off the hand that fed them.)
You have NetBSD (universal version), FreeBSD (originally x86-centric), and OpenBSD (hardcore security oriented).
Lots of times people like the BSD-world better then the Linux world because Linux operating systems are comparatively chaotic and are underrefined. With BSD it's classic Unix-style stuff, but it's still open source and free software and all that, so even though they lag behind Linux's developement a ways, they are very professional and have similar benifits to Linux.
The have a leadership driven development model with a few people at the top directing the activities of developers to create a more unified and probably more stable OS.
(personally I like Debian Linux)
