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If You're Dual Booting with Windows. Before doing anything to your Microsoft system I urge you to try out Fedora's Live Media, as discussed in a different video. It'll help you make sure that your hardware's compatible, besides giving you a basic comfort level with Fedora as a distribution. Once you're confident about your system then comes the next steps: preparing your system for Linux. If you have the means and the space it's easiest to set up a new physical hard drive for Linux, but if you have a laptop system, that's normally limited to a single hard drive, that means you need to make room for Linux. Microsoft systems are typically configured on one or two virtual partitions. If you happen to have two Microsoft partitions you'll see a C drive and a D drive with files in Windows Explorer. This assumes, of course, that D drive doesn't point to a CD/DVD drive. If you have two virtual partitions it's helpful if you can dedicate that D drive for Linux. In that case you'd have to move any files existing on that D drive elsewhere. But for many users they have one drive on one laptop and want to convert to Linux slowly. In that case, the defragmentation tools on Microsoft systems can help you make sure that there's space at the end of that drive. Once the system is defragmented you can use a tool such as Linux's GNOME Parted, Partition Magic, available on Microsoft systems, or QT Parted, which is a common option on the KDE Desktop environment. The Linux tools are shown here just for reference: G Parted, as well as QT Parted. For a Microsoft system to work effectively it requires some amount of free space on the Windows part of the drive. From personal experience I like to keep half of a Windows partition available as free space. That keeps the system working fairly efficiently even when the system is fragmented. In other videos we've discussed the space requirements for Fedora 11. Make sure you have enough free space to let Windows work effectively and then use the remaining space for Fedora 11. One of the advantages of Linux is the lack of fragmentation which allows it to work effectively in less free space. For example, on some systems I find Linux working effectively even when 10 percent of the space is free, 90 percent of the space is filled with files. You never see that on a Microsoft system. As an example configuration on my laptop system I have a hard drive of 160 gigabytes and about 40 gigabytes of files on my Windows XP system. Based on those parameters I set up an 80 gigabyte partition for my Microsoft system; I reserved 20 gigabytes for Fedora 11; 20 gigabytes for another Linux Distribution, in this case Buntu; as well as 32 gigabytes for my Home Directory shared between both Linux systems. The remaining space on that hard drive is set up as swap space, shared by both Linux systems. We'll talk more about how partitions are assigned during the installation process in another video.