
I considered reviewing Debian for this article. I downloaded a copy of Debian 3.0r2, making sure to get the disk with the 2.4 kernel. Everything you've heard about Debian being difficult to install? It's not totally true, but it's pretty close. I really wanted to try Debian, though, if only to use the vaunted apt-get system. I'd tried apt-rpm on a previous Red Hat installation, and it was great. Since Debian was turning out to be too difficult to put together, I decided to look for a debian-based distro.
The author mentions that Partition Magic 8 was his friend. I would would read the license carefully - PM seems to be licensed for one and only one machine. That's right - machine, not person! If you have a Knoppix CD, you can get very similar functionality by booting the CD and launching qtparted from a terminal window. It presents a pleasant GUI to resize, move and create partitions.