Jabird you've come to the right place! There is a wealth of information on this site addressing both of your questions. Welcome!

Gaim is probably the best MSN replacement you'll find for Linux. You might have to fiddle a bit to get it to connect to MSN though, MS recently changed the login mechanism and while Gaim can support this it needs some external files (mainly the Mozilla NSS stuff) to do it.

alright thanks alot. so all i gotta do is install those files and play with gain a little huh? oh and can i dual boot linux and windows? thanks

If you are using Win XP with a NTFS filesystem, I don't know. I have seen some issues with this posted before and the bootloader.
 
I have a fat32 Win XP system and Fedora installed on a dual boot with lilo as the bootloader, no problem. Either way, XP needs to be installed first, then Fedora.
 
Post whether it is a fat32 filsystem with XP or NTFS and lets see what the experts say.

I dual boot Linux and XP with XP on an NTFS partition, you're crazy if you persist with FAT32 on XP (Hopefully Longhorn will kill off FAT for good). Setting up the dual boot is no different than with FAT32: Install XP first, then your Linux distro and install the bootloader on the MBR.

Admiral, thanks for clarifying this for me. This is a throwback to older distrios and needing to share my data in the Win XP partition. I guess the posts that I have seen with the new distros are due to errors where the bootloader is set to, rather than trouble with the NTFS partition and the bootloader.
 
Now that I have a new larger hard drive this will not be an issue!
 
Since you raised it, can I change the fat32 to NTFS in XP and re-install the bootloader?

Quote:...Hopefully Longhorn will kill off FAT for good..

I think Micrsoft is hoping that Longhorn/Palladium will kill of Linux as well..

Quote:Admiral, thanks for clarifying this for me. This is a throwback to older distrios and needing to share my data in the Win XP partition. I guess the posts that I have seen with the new distros are due to errors where the bootloader is set to, rather than trouble with the NTFS partition and the bootloader.

Now that I have a new larger hard drive this will not be an issue!

Since you raised it, can I change the fat32 to NTFS in XP and re-install the bootloader?

NT, 2k and XP all include a command that let's you convert a FAT volume to NTFS without reformatting. The syntax is:

Code:

convert driveletter: /fs:ntfs

I'm not quite sure if you'll need to reinstall the bootloader after this or not but if you do, I posted a method of doing this in this thread.

Many thanks...
 
I converted the file system to NTFS. The whole process took less than 10 minutes.
 
Lilo still works, without needing a recovery.
 
Now off to compile the kernel for ntfs read support, which in Fedora, is not set in the config file.

Sorry bout the long wait, i have been busy with the holidays and all... anyway i have windows xp pro installed on a NTFS file system but i decided i am going to get to hard drives and hot swappem... thanks for all the info though