How brainless can Linux be?
That was so easy, it was trivial.
Last night, a little bored, and kicking my heels stuck in my home office for various reasons, I decided to dust off the Mandrake install CDs I’d created over Christmas.
Last weekend, the 10G hard disk in the machine I use as a radio and standby if my laptop throws a real wobbler (as it does) decided that it was going to go to the great scrapheap in the sky.
The cheapest replacement I could lay my hands on (the files are stored elsewhere on the network, so it’s only OS and apps) was a 20G model. So I partitioned it 50:50 Windows and for Linux (eventually).
So, out of idle curiosity, I slipped in the first Mandrake CD-ROM last night and rebooted the system. That was almost that.
The only piece of headscratching I was caused was over the two partitions. I realised that Windows had created a second one that Linux saw as a DOS partition, so I had to click on a button to delete the DOS partition and click on another button for Linux to create a Linux one in its place.
Then all I had to do was tell the installer I am in the UK and using UK-style hardware and accept the defaults.
Done.
I’m writing this piece using Konqueror. And, because there’s a pretty full suite of proggies already installed (Open Office, e-mail, IM, etc) I may not even need to discover how I install others 
I gave up smoking
Well done Joe!