What steps do i take to mount or better yet automount my NTFS partitions on RH 7.3 ?

And is there any distro that takes care of that automatically ?
Red hat 8 or Lycoris for instance ?

which distro is best known as a desktop alternative to windows XP ?

Try Mandrake

You would have to make sure the NTFS support is loaded either in your kernel or as a module.

Or take the easy way out and install either Suse or Mandrake.

RH 7.3 doesn't have NTFS support in the kernel, you'd need to recompile the kernel with NTFS support in order to be able mount the drive.

You should be able to see the "man fstab" pages on what options you need to enable, either that or it'll tell you where else to look and find out.

Mandrake does have NTFS support built in. There are some others which do too but I can't remember them off the top of my head, sorry.

Recompile kernel = very easy.

In your case the only thing you have to do is to enable NTFS Read Support under File Systems.

Read how to compile here: http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-7.3-Manual/custom-guide/ch-custom-kernel.html

/Toby

I appreciate your kind support and concern , you have been really helpful .
thank you for your time and effort