Installing Fedora Linux on a Windows System (Dual booting)
Fedora Linux, just like most Linux distributions, will happily co-exist on a hard disk drive with just about any version of Windows. This is a concept known as dual-booting. Essentially, when you power up your PC you will be presented with a menu which provides the option to boot either Fedora Linux or Windows. Obviously you can only run one operating system at a time, but it is worth noting that the files on the Windows partition of your disk drive will be available to you from Fedora Linux regardless of whether your Windows partition was formatted using NTFS, FAT16 or FAT32.
Starting the Dual Boot Installation
The first step in the installation process is to obtain the Fedora installation media in a format suitable for installing on a hard disk which already contains a Windows installation. The easiest way to achieve this is to boot the Fedora Live CD and perform the configuration and installation from the live session. Live CD support was introduced in Fedora Linux beginning with the release of Fedora 7. The Fedora 7 Live CD images can be downloaded from the following links:
- Fedora Live CD - i386 (32-bit AMD, Intel Pentium, Intel Core Duo)
ftp://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/7/Live/i386/Fedora-7-KDE-Live-i686.iso ftp://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/7/Live/i386/Fedora-7-Live-i686.iso
- Fedora Live CD - x86_64 (64-bit AMD64, EM64T, Intel Xeon, Intel Core 2 Duo)
ftp://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/7/Live/x86_64/Fedora-7-Live-x86_64.iso ftp://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/7/Live/x86_64/Fedora-7-KDE-Live-x86_64.iso
