Former Zoo'er Newbie Needs Help

["W. Guy Finley" <wgfinley@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello guys.  I signed up for the list a month or so ago when I first heard
about Linux.  Since then, I've moved to far northern Illinois and,
unfortunately, we don't have a huge, immensely helpful LUG like KLUG here
(yet).
So, I was wondering if you could help a guy (no pun intended) out.

I'm stuck between what to do for distributions.  I am running Win98 right
now and frankly, am sick and tired of this buggy piece of garbage.  I want
to run a dual boot system so that I can do most of my productivity stuff on
Linux (word processing, internet, email, etc) and only use Winblows for what
I have to (games, web design using Dreamweaver and Fireworks).  I'm not a
programmer by any means and have no knowledge of Unix.  I would consider
myself a power Winblows user though and pretty good with hardware (have done
MB swap, installed many add ons, use ISDN, etc).

Here's my problem.  I'm very taken by Caldera since they have Partition
Magic (albeit a scaled down version) built in and would make it very easy
for me to partition my existing drive as well as select my OS at startup.
However, I'm not too crazy about being stuck with only KDE and the limited
amount of extras Caldera has in their distro.

At Best Buy today I noticed they have a fairly ample Linux section now
including Caldera, Red Hat and Suse.  I have been really drawn to Suse
because it looks like a great distro with tons of extras without the Red Hat
price tag.  However, I figure for me to easily install Suse I'm going to
have to plunk down $60 for Partition Magic.  I've considered just
downloading Suse but figured that would be even harder.  Suse is $29 and I
think Caldera was $39.

I've heard about FIPS but I'm concerned about usability.  I understand FIPS
is a pretty technical program and I think I'd be better of with Partition
Magic's GUI and Wizards where I just tell it I want it to create a Linux
partition for install.  Am I wrong?  Also, if I use FIPS am I then using
LILO for choosing my OS?  Is LILO difficult to use? Are there any other alte
rnatives?

Any advice would be appreciated,

--Guy Finley
  (anxious to flee Bill but just don't know how yet!)