[InterKnight]

I decided to download all four of the fedora ISOs the other night. I started the download before I went to bed, knowing that it would be finished by the time I would wake up, and sure enough it was. Now that I have the ISOs burned to CDs, I am a little nervous. I have never installed Linux on a system before, so I am not completely sure what to do.
I started the installation, but got a bit nervous and I got out of it. I am not sure exactly what I want to do. I want to learn the graphical and the text sides of Fedora. In the beginning of the installation I was asked if I wanted to use the graphical or text version...Is it possible to use both? Also, I was not sure exactly what I would do about keeping Windows on the same system. Someone who replied to a previous thread that I started named a certain utility, but I am not exactly sure how to use it. I have only touched the tip of Linux, and this will be the first time I will actually dive in. I just want to do it right. Unfortunately, I do not have another PC that I could strictly dedicate to Linux, and my wife would not much like the change over to a command Interface, so I wanted to keep Windows on the computer for her. Could someone help me so that I will not be so nervous about this installation? What exactly should I do? Thank you for all help and advice.

[saikee]

You really dived in head first this time if you went for Fedora.

A simpler way is to get a Live CD like Knoppix 3.6, have it fired up in 5 minutes operating on the CD (not in hard disk), see if it kick starts all your hardware, fully satisfied that you like it then install it into the hard drive. It is just one CD. Fedora has 4 and it compiles everything during the 2-hour installation.

No need to feel nervous. You need tools to save a bad situation and that would be a DOS bootable floppy with fdisk.exe inside (original Windows installation will do too). At any point you don't like Linux just slip it in, boot up DOS and type fdisk /mbr to get back to the position before Linux installation.

For playing with Linux you need to create a partition for it to reside in. Generally for a starter a 5Gb partition should be OK plus another partition for swap, say 1Gb. I would recommend when it comes to choice of booting go for a floppy for the Linux. This means no floppy you boots to Windows and with floppy you boot to Linux. If you tired of inserting the floppy tell us and we can give instruction on how to get rid of it in the booting process.

The standard method is to let a Linux's bootloader into MBR, which is the Master Boot Record of your hard disk, reversible by the DOS floppy I mentioned above. Fedora's bootloader is Grub.

Have fun!

[lynch]

Originally Posted by saikee

It is just one CD. Fedora has 4 and it compiles everything during the 2-hour installation.

Fedora installs RPM packages along with a pre-compiled kernel. It doesnt compile everything on the 4 CDs (5 if you get the rescue CD).That would take a lot longer than 2 hours. I just installed Fedora in 25 minutes.
I agree with saikee that you should try one of the liveCDs from SUSE, Mandrake, Mepis or Knoppix before you do a hard drive install. If you download the 1st Mandrake CD you can use it to resize your XP partition and install Fedora on the unallocated space, letting the installer partition and format for Linux without harming XP. You can then abort the Mandrake installation and install whatever Linux you please.
And you NEVER need a 1 GB swap partition for a regular desktop install; it's a waste of space as most of that 1 GB will never be touched.
lynch