Installation of Fedora 9 with Vista on Dell 1525

I was using Fedora 8 on my desktop, but recently I had bought a laptop which came pre installed with Vista (as is the case with most of them these days), so I was waiting for the latest version of Fedora to be released (evidently Fedora 9)

I had successfully installed it on my laptop and this is probably one of the smoothest installation (apart from partitions as dell ships after creating four primary partitions which is the maximum limit).

The following post helped a lot http://equivocation.org/node/96
There is support for USB drives in Fedora 9 and I used one to test my hardware first before installing on the disk. The USB drive can be created from windows

The steps for installation on a Dell laptop with Vista preinstalled are as follows:

1. Free up some space from Windows Disk Resize program present in Control Panel (do a disk fragmentation before doing so). I freed up 25 GB.
   
2. Download the DVD image of Fedora 9 and burn it on a disk
3. Download a live image of GParted and install it on a CD or USB drive
4. Restart the system and boot from CD or USB to start ( I remember initially I was linux boot was not working from VISTA but some patch was applied by liveusb-creater which fixed the problem
5. Delete the dell media direct partition as maximum number of primary partitions allowed is 4 (I don't use it anyway). Once that partition is deleted you can create new partitions for linux. I created three partitions (SWAP - 2GB, /home - 15GB, / (root) - 15GB). Apply the changes to create the partition
6. Install from Fedora 9 DVD and follow the steps. When fedora asks where to install linux, choose 'Custom Partition' and select the partitions created abouve
7. Select the packages you want to install and proceed ahead
8. Once the installation is over, you will see a dual boot screen with Feodra and Other option. Log in Fedora as the Other option will not work immediately.
9. In fedodra, login and go to terminal. Do 'su' and then 'gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst'. In that change the last entry for 'Other' from 'rootnoverify(0,1)' to 'rootnoverify(0,2)'. You can also change the title 'Other' to 'Vista' or anything you like. Now on reboot you can login in Vista.

All the hardware was working fine after installation except sound and mic. For sound, I had to unmute the 'Surround' option in audio panel and for resolving microphone problem it took some time. The built in web camera works by default, so does rest of hardware

Enjoy Linux..