I have decided that I should learn to use Linux proficiently for employment reasons. I have Windows XP and my hard drive is formatted with a single partition. I want to have both XP and Linux on this machine. Can I do this without reformatting and losing everything I currently have? If not I can just buy another hard drive I suppose. Also, what version of Linux is recommended for relative beginners? I'm told there are many different versions. I have a small amount of Solarus and Unix experience but not much.

Yes, you can resize your hard drive (even if it is ntfs partition) http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/ntfsresize.html#example . Some distros I guess come with it for their install (listed on that site), though, their is also the option of just grabbing one of the small boot distros listed there to do the resizing... I did it recently on my laptop, and lost no data at all... Though, I needed to grab one of the small linux boot distros listed with the newest version of ntfsresize so it could resize my filesystem.

Anyway, I recommend Fedora Core 4 (that is what I use). I installed FC4 on both my desktop and laptop, and have no problems.. Though, getting all the laptop features to work took some doing. Installing on PC's however, is a breeze for most linux distros.

Linux is pretty similar to Unix. I won't go into the details of the similarities. First thing to know about Linux is that you can basically do more promt wise than GUI wise on Linux. One thing you can do with your current hard drive is called partitioning. This let's you "divide" your hard drive into seperate sections. Say I made a 30 GB and a 250 GB division out of my 280 GB hard drive. I would use one for Linux and the other for XP. You can usually do this with the Linux installation discs. What I recommend to you is that you start off with Mandrake Linux, it is very user friendly. All you need to do is download the .ISO files, which are CD image files. Then just restart your computer with the first one in the drive and the installation should begin. You can also check if your .ISO file you downloaded is valid with an md5 checksum. You should do this so you don't waste a CD and CD burning time with a corrupted download, but you don't have to. I usually don't. I recommend you partition your hard drive with a professional tool or a downloaded tool before you install Linux. Last time I used the partition manager that came with my Linux distributer, it re-formated my whole hard drive. If you have any other questions, just ask.