Linux Help?

Ubuntu is a good distro for beginners. Give it a try and see what you think of the look and feel. If you like it, you can try more advanced distros if you like.

The safest thing to do is to install Linux on a second hard drive. It will walk you through the install, just like Windows does. As long as you select the correct drive, it will take care of everything. There's an installation guide at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation that you might want to read through first.

Linux won't run Windows programs natively any more than Mac OS will. Software is compiled for a particular Os and generally can't be run on another OS. None of your Windows software will work. There are Linux equivalents of many apps, and they're usually free. For example, you can use OpenOffice instead of MS Office, Gimp instead of Photoshop, etc. There are emulators like WINE which allow you to create a virtual Windows PC within Linux. You can run many Windows apps under WINE.

Wireless and bluetooth can be touchy, depending upon your hardware. There's some helpful documentation at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BluetoothSetup

In general, ask for help or advice on the Ubuntu forums. There are plenty of people there who will be happy to help you out.

Any distro is good for something. Slackware is one of the oldest and most Unix like. Gentoo REQUIRES you to understand how to recompile the Linux Kernel in order to get it running. Beyond that any distro is relatively easy to install and run. Incidently, the Linux kernel itself provides drivers for most wireless cards. You also have to install wireless-tools but you do that through your distribution. Ubuntu, Fedora, even Debian sound like they would all meet your specifications. OpenSuse and Mandriva definitely would. Once you install OS in a new partition or three (don't ask until you're ready to attend a Linux User Group and wherever you are in the world there is probably one in the area), they will ask you to install a boot loader such as grub or lilo. Grub is easier, and you can boot Windows from it.

Wine is a Linux program which emulates Windows for many (not all) Windows programs. I don't know if you can use MS Office on it because I HATE office, but you might. If not you can read and save Microsoft Office programs in prograams like Open Office and ABIWord.

Well if I compare your English skills to your computer skills I would say tryout Ubuntu or OpenSuse. They seem to be the most user friendly. Have you ever successfully installed an OS before? While your looking up distros go ahead and research partitioning. Google is your best friend.

Wikipedia has a great article.

Get UBUNTU. It is absolutely fool proof and virtually effortless. Get a LIVE cd and boot it up. Then answer some very easy questions and it will do ALL the work for you.