Setup Advice Wanted

I'll try to give at least something to go further. 1) not much. If you are able to get Fedora running then you have a good base. 2) you will need a partition with a filetype that all systems that you need can read/write from/to. Since you include windows in your list your best bet is FAT32. Let Linux format this partition since the last windows versions restrict the sice of it during format (but can access larger fat32 partitions then they can format). Just add the partition in question to the fstab of the linux(es) you use and as a disk to map for windows. 3) second drive isn't a problem. Some distros have trouble installing on drives higher than second but that isn't your case. 4) no idea as I haven't installed 64Studio on anything but it's own. Most distros play nice however but as always YMMV. 5) No idea. You're comparing 2 very different distros: one is RH based, the other Debian. In theory there shouldn't be any problem but I would not take it for granted. However since it works with Fedora you can be sure it can be made to work with 64Studio. But maybe not out of the box. 6) depends on what you want to do and achieve. Onboard sound systems are often not much to write home about. But if they have a digital IO they can be enough for some applications. This will depend more on your needs/expectations than anything else. As for the linux filesystem: there isn't a single one but you have choice of a lot. There is ext2 and ext3, and Reiser that are typical linux ones. Those are included everywhere. Then there is a load of others like XFS, FAT family, JFS and others that offer some advantages in specific applications. Do a search and read a bit. If you are used to Fedora and know your way in that distro, then looking at something like CCRMA might make sense to get you into audio faster with less troubles.