While creedon has mad good suggestions, some distro's of Linux are actually quite painless to install. Mandrake and SuSE Linux are very user friendly in the install process and will usualy auto-detect all your hardware right off the bat.
Also, these distro's will format your hardrive, or a partition, to the correct ext2 filesystem.
It's not THAT hard, but it's not THAT easy eather. Onece, you get the hang of it tho, youll be flying. Good Luck!