Fedora 8 is coming, but I feel people should read before they forge ahead and install the system etc etc. I am hoping to make this the most helpful walk through by including the most possbilities and problems yet keeping it sensibly simple so you don't have to go through pages and pages just to find a simple answer.
I'm majorly talking about fedora here but it works for almost all linux systems.
1. Download Fedora: This is easy but take a moment to consider your hardware capability. From Fedora 7, 256MB of RAM will not promise you a good performance. It'll run but your hardware will probably reach its best performance at a lower version. Fedora 6 is already great if you don't have the newest hardware. Wireless internet support is an issue but it can be solved installing some driver and you get great performance. You could also try Fedora 7 or 8 with XFCE in place of KDE and GNOME which are the choices of interfaces and it is pretty great too. (But installing XFCE has to be an internet install, it doesn't come with the CDs. Only good internet speed prevents it from being a pain in the ass)One nice thing about linux is that performance otherwise is not affected. You can choose your own flavors for everything for your best benefit. You can download the DVD or CD isos etc.
2. Decide installation method: This is a quite crucial step. Follow closely. First of all, you gotta figure out what kind of installation method do you want. There are basically 3:
(a) A hard drive dual-boot (I won't give up Windows easily at the moment...) from hard drive
(b) A hard drive dual-boot installation through burned discs.
(c) A virtual machine installation.
I recommend a over b, because it's enviromental friendly (haha) and it's much faster. We'll do a partial a (I'll explain why partial).
c is a little different from a and b. You need to have a virtual machine software get that ready and then it's essentially the same as a and b. People who don't use linux vastly usually do c. You still boot only windows and does your everyday work and whenever you miss linux, you just fire it up! But I'll walk you through a,b kind of installations because I feel like cheating on Fedora with c. And because you will be playing with Fedora, see what it does, how it goes right? A and b gives you the most real feeling and c will look fake to you. So follow me down the a path.
3. Prepare your partition: To install a different system, you first of all need a different partition- universal truth. And by the way, why not? Partitioning encounters very little resource cost yet it keeps your things and files seperated for protection. You need a software to do your partitioning. You can do it during the process of installing Fedora or you can get it ready before you install Fedora. To do it in windows, it is a little complicated because I have always used partition magic which is a paid ware. There are portable parition magic that you can download but they are kind of illegal. I found a free one that I encourage the reader to try out, Cute Partition Manager. (And give me the feedbacks.) The softwares by themselves should be pretty intuitive. You first one to resize one of your older partitions to give space for a new partition.Then you need to create a new "ext3" partition and a "swap" partition. With Fedora 6,7, 10G is quite enough even if you do a "full" installation. And I would suspect so for Fedora 8 also. I have read something about the size of swap: some people say it's best twice the size of your RAM. Let's just follow that, it will work out perfectly. (Someone tell me if the optimal level is relative to your ram size or is a definite number.) You'll need to restart and keep your computer sound and safe and be careful in this step. If you are not sure, ask here. This is the most destructive step. I advised computer dummies to partition their computer in this post, but you don't really need that for linux. It's never really goes wrong.
4. Up to this point, you need to burn either the DVD, the first of the CDs, or the rescue CD to reboot it. Another reason I didn't do it the complete hard drive install installing GRUB is that there may be times you have trouble and a burned disc makes it much easier. Insert your CD, when boot, you need set the computer to boot it from your cd/dvd drive. Usually, you press delete or esc. or F some number to interrupt the startup process. Sometimes the BIOS suppors 1 time bootup option then you let it boot from CD this time, otherwise change your boot sequence and boot from CD before hard drive.
5. When you get into the Fedora installation window, type in install from hard drive. To install from the discs, you can skip this and go to 6. You should choose the right directory to install from. Fedora uses a different directory naming system. It's not C,D etc. It's hda(x,y) in older versions and sda(x,y) in newer versions. X is for the number of real hard drive starting from 0, and y is for the number of partition from 0. So C on the first hard disk is hda(0,0) or sda(0,0). I think they let you choose this instead of having to type it in yourself. And then the right directory.
6.The installation basically starts now. One word of advice, you need to install the windows series that you want first, and install grub and let grub right to MBR. (You'll know what I'm talking about once you start installing. So you probably want to note this down or print this part.) Carefully choose the right partitions, put / in your ext3 partition previously created and put swap at the swap partition you created. Then follow the straightforwared install wizard. During the process, you'll see GRUB has recognized your preinstalled windows systems and when you boot the next time, GRUB will welcome you with the choice of systems!
7. The installation is not over. There might be configurations to be done post-install depending on your hardware. And you should get it tweaked to make it perform MUCH better. Besides, you'll kind of pick up a little more about what is going on in the system etc.
If you have problems, here are all problems known to me solved.
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