I've got a few hurdles I need to cross. I attempted to install Fedora earlier, but got stuck half-way through, lost the basic use of my computer for about half a day while I figured out how to fix the problem, and then got everything back to normal with the help of my awesome University ITS guys. Needless to say, I'm going to do this extra careful this time.

First of all, I'm worried about the ability of Fedora to make use of my hardware, particularly my WiFi card since I tend to access the internet through free, public hotspots. The only webpage I can find that has information for getting Linux and my particular set of hardware to speak to each other, though, is in Italian (translated to English here), but I don't trust google translate to play nicely with technical instructions, and it's also apparent that literal translations from Italian into English tend not to make sense. Should I just copy/paste the command lines, and not necessarily worry about what they're doing until I actually figure out the OS at a later time?

Secondly, I'm looking for some help setting up a partition scheme. If I have my first bit of reading from my book right, Linux boots from a small /boot partition, the core of the OS is stored in the root partition, and I can also designate some swap space for program efficiency in Linux and a /home partition for general data files. My questions in this case are, what format should I use for these partitions, and will my /home partition be readable from both the OSX side and the Linux side of my computer? The important things here are that I have the necessary partitions working and a general space for my personal data that is accessible from both OSes.

Finally, I kept getting mysterious errors when I made my first ill-fated attempt to install Fedora on this system the first time around, so I basically want to do everything different. I don't want to use Boot Camp, but rather just the Disk Utility and Anaconda to do the necessary partitioning. If possible, I don't think I'd even use the Linux Bootloader, but rather just boot from the typical drive selection I get when I boot my computer now with just the OSX partition (I would assume the OSX analogue to the Bootloader). I'd rather avoid it, but I'm willing to completely re-partition and re-format my HD. I have very little data I would want to backup and save (a minecraft world and some homework files from my old ICS classes, mostly), as most of my stuff can be downloaded from the internet, is already on the internet, and/or can be re-created easily enough. If there are other, free tools worth downloading to help this process along, then knowing where to get those would help as well.

Please ask if there's any more information you need from me, and thanks in advance for helping me out.