What's the best route to go here with Linux/Unix?

[sandmanwake]

Ok, I'm currently running Windows 98 on a 3gig drive, but would like to play with Linux/Unix some. What's the bare minimum amount of hard drive space I would need to dedicate to Linux and still be able to do something decent with both OS's? It'll be a dual boot system of course.

Also, which flavor and version of Linux should I start out with?

 

[Buddha Bart]

my stock install of redhat 7 came in just under 900 megs (not quite stock, i added a few packages). So mandrake would probably be about the same.

a stock win98se install is under 400mb last i checked.

You could pretty easily have both.

bart

 

[mcveigh]

I use mandrake 7.2 and would reccomend about 1.5 gigs so you have room.
also at least make your /home directory on a separate partition.

 

[Sunner]

Depends.
If you do a really really small install you can get away with like 20 or so megs with some distros(then of course there are some very specialized distros that come on 1 floppy and such).

If you want a workstation with KDE or Gnome, and some common tools, but no development stuff, you'll probabaly be at 250-500 MB depending on the tools and distro.

For a fullblown development/graphics workstation, anywhere above 600 MB, again depending on distro/package selections.

 

[MGMorden]

Yeah, if you really want to save space I'd go with one of the really small distro's and add the packages you want. You probably could get away with 350 megs (250 mb for /, and 100mb for /home) if you needed to, but that would be making sacrifices when it came to available software.