Really appreciate all the tips! I grabbed an image of PCLinux last night (I think I even still have one from long ago). Last night I got one of the first from the download list, which is a Gnome version, but I'm guessing the "2007" things are smaller? I'm grabbing one now anyway.
I still want to try to get that Arch thing going as I had gone too far to quit on it, and I like the idea of just a handful of packages installed and running. I was eventually able to get a custom base install on, which only had enough to access the router for downloads. I had to print their base package list from here: http://www.archlinux.org/packages/ ,then look up most of them online to see what the hell they did. It still ended up getting messy when I went out for the XFCE4 stuff, as I had to download a bunch of things I wasn't sure of. To be honest, I'm not even sure I need XFCE4 as a desktop.
To make a long story short, by the end of the night, I had managed to ruin the nice clean Arch install and had it hanging on one of the first boot screens, just past the LILO OS selection screen. It was running fine with XFCE4, and I had gotten my graphics all configured, but when I did an actual reboot it was dead. I'm now grabbing that "Partition Saving" program. Hopefully, that will let me dump images at each stage and prevent another such disaster. If it works out, I'll also then be able to easily audition some different distro setups.
I do definitely plan to try PCLinuxOS, but I'm not really looking for much right now. I'm going to try to stick to just a couple native Linux apps and base drivers. You seem to know your way around with it, so if you don't mind a couple non-PCLinux-related questions:
After that "base" install of something like Arch, what would be the absolute minimum group of packages to dump on there, just to be able to launch something like Seq24, an audio editor, and maybe a multi-track audio app? For right now, I'd be running built-in audio (some Analog Devices chipset -AD1885 maybe), and a 1x1 M-Audio USB adapter for MIDI (I think it's a "Uno").
One more dummy question: I read that you should start with a Windows install on dual-boot configs, so I went back and re-partitioned & installed 98Lite, then went for the Linux stuff. I did a couple gigs primary fat32 for Windows, then a nice big empty fat32 logical drive in an extended part of the same size for storage and Ghost images, and left the remainder of the drive free for Linux. On that, I did a logical swap part of 500Megs (machine has 256M or so in RAM), then a logical ReiserFS or something for my install partition (2 or 3 gigs). Was that the correct way to go? I also was careful to leave the two fat partitions isolated during the Linux install, but I think I screwed up by not assigning any sort of mount points,etc. LILO's config file showed a commented out listing for a DOS partition, which I de-commented and tried to add to the boot, but it gave me a "file/folder doesn't exist" error for hda1 or whatever it was.
Thanks again for all the advice, and sorry to nag you with all this newbie mess.
George
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