dual booting - accessible partition resizers and some other questions

[Daniel Dalton]

Hi all,

I have used my debian setup for around 6 months now on a $30 compaq I got 
off ebay.
It has 256 mb ram, 800 mhz cpu (p3) and 10 gb hard disk...

I now want to dual boot windows and linux for another 6 months on my good 
box which is a hp with 1 gb of ram, 320 gb hard disk and dual core 2.1 
ghz.
Then I'll remove windows.

First what exactly is required to set up a dual booting system?
Is it just resizing the windows partition, adding a swap partition (in my 
case 2 gb) and adding a partition for linux?
Does anything have to be done for grub?
Or am I missing something?
Do I need to run a disk defrag or something?

Ok so to resize the windows partition, what do I do?
Do I use a livecd to do this? And if so is it accessible to a totally 
blind user?
(Braille or speech...)
Or can the debian installer handle this?

Once resizing is done then how do I tell linux to install to its own new 
partition and make a swap and leave windows alone?

Finally I believe my windows partition is taking up the whole disk  and 
should I have a windows disk available?
I don't think I have one...

Also should I go with ubuntu or debian?
I was considering ubuntu since there is lots of information on it like in 
the forums and it comes with a whole bunch of stuff that could be useful,
but I have used debian a lot to and it seems pretty good.
So what's the best choice?

I know this is a hard question to answer... :-)

Thanks for any help,

BTW, does ubuntu have an accessible installer?

Thanks,

-- 
Daniel Dalton

http://members.iinet.net.au/~ddalton/
d.dalton at iinet.net.au