First Steps in Tuxland

I decided to customise my work laptop, a Dell Latitude D620, to dual boot with Windows XP and Fedora 9, keeping my Windows boot loader. There are lots of resources out there about how to do this but I had such trouble finding a coherent set of steps that were right for me. I eventually cobbled together a procedure using bits and pieces of two or three blogs I found (I'll credit them later), tried this out and it worked for me. I decided to document this in a blog of my own so that maybe somebody else out there will find this useful. My intention is that this will be a kind of diary with occasional posts about how I got on with my dual-boot configuration.

A word about me: I am an absolute newbie at linux, so don't expect me to say anything cutting-edge or intelligent. In fact I expect to get quite a few comments about how I should've done things differently.

Why Fedora 9? Most of the people I know who have taken the plunge have clustered around Fed, so by choosing it myself I have a ready-made support network. And 9 is the latest release.

Why dual boot? I'm quite a risk-averse person, and I didn't want to risk messing up my work laptop enough that I wouldn't be able to do my day-job.

Why keep the Windows boot-loader? Because by doing so I would learn a little about how boot loaders work.