no, it's not. When installing Linux, you should be given one or two options for a boot loader. Once done with that, it should find your other OS's and make entries in the boot loader. When you reboot, a menu will show with your OS choices. Simply pick on and off you go!

The way I dual boot linux on my comp was to install lilo on my root partiton and not the MBR, create a boot disk, boot into linux then open bash with su, and then entered dd=/dev/hda4 bs=512 count=1 > /root/linux.bin (hda4 being the root partition).

Then I copied the linux.bin file on to floppy, boot up windows and copy the linux.bin file to c:\, then edit my boot.ini file, adding the line c:\linux.bin="linux", works really well.

__________________
NemesisXP

The easiest way to go, would be to purchase a unix software package from the store (Redhat, Mandrake, Suse). The package will tell you how to partition your hard drive.

30 gig is plenty. I only had 6 gig on my computer when I installed Redhat. I would go 15/15 gig on the partition depending on your needs and use.

You would do it over your windows 98, but make sure you know what part of your hard drive you are going to put Linux, because you need to make room for Linux by moving some of your win 98 files out of the way and putting them in a different location on hard drive. Some people do not realize this and may delete important startup files in windows.

The boot option did not come with my version of Redhat and I had to search google for a boot script, but there are several ways you could do this. Just search www.google.com

And as a previous reply had stated, to be safe:
1) Make a boot disk for Win 98.
2) Make backup copies of important files.
3) Follow directions on install of Linux.

As you've stated your new to Linux, it may pay to install Win98 first, and partation the drives there (.e.g. you can setup a NTFS D drive of 1-2 GB for linux only using the disk administrator/Disk Management). This will make the drive easily idenitifable when installing linux (using for example disk druid); where you have to partion the say, D drive further (e.g into native and swap linux drives).
Later in the linux installation (with the more recent verisons), you should be prompted if you would like the dual-boot option upon start-up. Subsquently, you should be prompted with the DOS/Linux option upon startup.