Dual boot

==Tips==
By far, the most stable approach to running Linux without messing up your
Windows XP installation is dual booting, assuming you have enough room on
your hard drive allocate space for a Linux partition. I have done hundreds
of installations by resizing the Windows partition to make room for a Linux
partition (ext3 or ext4 file system) with without corrupting the original
partition, and this has become the normal way to install Linux on a Windows
computer for the first time. You could easily get by with a 512 meg swap
partition and a 5 gig main partition for a robust installation of any of the
major binary distributions like Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, Arch etc. You might
actually be able to get away with as little as a 2 gig main partition, but
that would leave very little room to grow. Sometimes, but not always, after
resizing an NTFS partition, one must run ntfsfix on the resized NTFS partition.
For partition management (resize, create, modify) I recommend Parted Magic,
another Linux distribution tailored to that task, that boots from CD and
runs entirely in RAM. See: http://partedmagic.com/
By 384 megs of available RAM, I assume you mean 384 megs of installed RAM.
If that's the case, you will find most any Linux will run fine, and will run
circles around Windows XP as far as performance goes. BTW, if you installed
more RAM (1 gig), you could easily install a Linux distribution in
VirtualBox. See: https://www.virtualbox.org/ Doing so let's you run
another operating system (i.e. Linux) in a window on your Windows desktop
computer, or the other way around.
You can forget printing from Linux with your Kodak ESP-3 printer. That is
probably true for scanning also. For Linux printers, see:
http://openprinting.org/ (temporarily off-line). This will give nothing but
grief.
But, all hope is not lost. Get the Linux distribution named Puppy Linux.
http://www.puppylinux.com/ With Puppy, you can boot from a CD or USB memory
and if you desire it never needs to touch your hard drive. But, Puppy can
also be installed as files on your hard drive. A few years ago I ran Puppy
on a Toshiba Libretto with 32 megs of RAM. It required some experimentation
to get that to work, but it was amazingly usable.
Good luck.
Andy Figueroa