Single- or Dual-Boot Setup?

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If you don’t have Windows on your machine, you can skip right over this section. If you do have Windows installed on your machine, the first thing you are going to have to do is decide whether or not you want to keep it.

It is possible to have both Windows and Linux installed on the same machine and for them to happily coexist. In my own case, I started out with just such a dual-boot setup. In time, however, I found that I used the Linux side of things exclusively. Having so much disk space being taken up by a Windows system I didn’t use seemed a waste of prime real estate, so eventually I just dumped the whole thing and went for a straight Linux-only setup. My feeling is that unless you have some application that you really need that is not available on the Linux side (probably some game), then go for the Linux-only setup and just forget about Windows. Linux has most of what you will need anyway, and because OpenOffice can read and write MS Office files, you’ll be well enough connected, if that is of concern to you.

You may be thinking that if you do as I suggest and dump your Windows system when you install Linux, you might have to reinstall Windows if you don’t like Linux or if you can’t get it installed properly. That would be a considerable waste of time and energy, to be sure. However, believe it or not, there are advantages to my suggestion even if your no-go scenario turns out to be the case.

You may have noticed that your Windows system, as you’ve used it over time, has gotten sort of gunked up — it is no longer the quick little kitten it used to be. Menus don’t pop open as quickly as they used to, things take longer to start up than they did before, and you find yourself saying “what the Sam Habberdack is that!” all the time, as mysterious things happen with increasing frequency.

This is just the nature of the beast, and a very good way of getting things back to normal is to reinstall the whole thing. So even if you do decide to come back to Windows later, you’ll be doing yourself a favor, because it should run better than before. It’s a little more work up front, but in the long run you’ll be a happier camper.

If, on the other hand, you opt for running both Windows and Linux, you will be greeted by a Linux boot-selection screen when you start up your machine, from which you can choose to continue booting up Linux or choose Windows in its stead. After that, boot-up proceeds as normal for the system you selected. This setup works fine, so you needn’t worry.

Of course, in order to create a dual-boot setup, you will need to have either two hard disks (preferable) or at least two partitions on one hard disk. The disk or partition on which you intend to install Fedora Core (the non-Windows, or target, partition) will also have to be at least 5 gigabytes (GB) in size. If you don’t have a single partition of that size available but do have two or three that you can use, that will do too. And if you don’t have any of these, you can either install another internal hard disk or create another partition with some partitioning software, such as Partition Magic, before trying to install Fedora Core.

The state of your target partition or disk will determine what creating a dual- boot system means for you during the installation process. If, for example, the target partition or disk is just unformatted free space, the installation process will be much like a straight Linux-only installation. If, however, the target hard disk or partition is already formatted in a DOS file system, such as Fat16 or Fat32, then you will have a bit more work cut out for you during the installation process. The dual-boot installation process is explained in the “Dual-Boot Installation” section later in the chapter — read through that section to get an idea of whether or not you’ll feel comfortable doing what needs to be done.

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