you won't be able to just install it over fedora and save all your files in the process (unless the two products are intertwined in some special way). what you will instead need to do, is backup your fedora files you need, delete the partition, and then install mandriva.

just keep note of your booting system, but my guess is mandriva will set this up for you automatically.

you will only lose your windows data if you tamper with the partition windows is installed on.

Well of course i will not install mandriva on c drive (where windows is installed ) . Even if i back up the data in fedora and save it in some other drive for that matter.
Can i directly install mandriva on that fedora space to overwrite it or
will i have to boot xp2 cd to make that particular partition NTFS and then finally install windows on it.

Obviously you are dual booting windows and linux, so you have fedora and windows installed in two partitions of your hard disk. You can easily access the windows drive from fedora by mounting it.

So you should transfer all your files from fedora to the windows partition and then go about installing mandriva. Mandriva will automatically write over the existing boot-loader and give you options to either boot to windows or mandriva. After installing mandriva you can again access the windows partition and transfer the files back to your linux partition.

Note that in the current edition of mandriva ( Spring 2009 ) there are serious display problems related with Intel Drivers. So if you are using any Intel Graphics Card then I would advise you to not use the latest Mandriva.

well i thought it was very much compared to windows xp and peroformed well in some cases better the windows 7.
well what kind of display problems are you talking about...?
will that also effect on other widgets or applications inside it...?

He is talking about drivers. Generally linux is not supported by hardware vendors and so the drivers are maintained by people in the open-source community. Drivers for windows do not work in linux, and vice versa.

Yes, if there are driver issues, it will affect anything that is "graphical". The affect may be different depending on what capabilities of the video card are required by said piece of software.

Intel Drivers are OpenSource which means they fully support Linux. Recently they made a lot of changes like literally rewriting the Intel Drivers for better performance, and unfortunately it had serious display issues.

They are in the process of fixing them. I heard that they have improved it a lot, but those improvements were made after the release of mandriva 2009. All linux distribution like ubuntu 9.04, mandriva 2009 have this problem.

So you just have to wait for the next release where they will incorporate all these improvements.

You can read more at Softpedia Mandriva's Review of 2009 Spring Edition

http://www.softpedia.com/reviews/lin...w-113434.shtml

so apart from a , i guess a cheesy graphic display which again i guess will be mostly a resolution problem , rest all things works fine..?
like installing packages and other stuffs.......

yes, all other things except for some display would be just fine. I'm guessing if you disable compiz fusion and other display effects it should be fine.

And mandriva is supposed to be really good when it comes to managing the system, installing rpm packages etc... You can do other stuff like browsing, listening to music...etc probably if you try to use flash video or watch any video that's where this intel bug would affect you..

If mandriva upgrades to the latest linux kernel 2.6.30 then it would almost solve that problem.