I've had pretty good luck installing Linux on a machine that already
had NT.

Because I'm lazy, I just bought a second hard drive for the linux
install and that minimized problems with the dual boot.  It's a minor
nuisance to set up the boot partition so the NT loader can get at
linux, but only a minor one.

One thing I don't know, since the NT I have is v 4, is whether the
newest NTFS (5), with Win2K, is readable by the ntfs filesystem
module....

R