h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

... and another couple of things, while I think of them:

(c) If you do find kpackage useful and decide to use RPMs for installation, there is a program available called checkinstall (I think) which can take a package in tar.gz form and make an RPM out of it.

(d) RedHat's website has loads of RPMs for each distribution. They are probably the same ones as you have on your CDs, but there might be more.

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Again I am chipping in here on the basis of very limited knowledge, but I have a feeling that the lilo configuration has to be written to the Master Boot Record before it takes effect. It's something I would recommend that you do with great care, and make sure that you have rescue disks to boot from if it goes wrong. That said, I set my machine up to dual-boot with no problem, and I have W*nd*ws as the default - as you say, this allows me to do other things (e.g. pop out for a 5-mile hike while it's cranking up). I did it all within KDE - again all on GUIs, no command-line stuff, if I remember rightly.

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Yup you need to run Lilo to get the new information written to disk.
Lilo is one of those programs run as root and all you need to do it type lilo at the command prompt (or /sbin/lilo if it complains about not being able to find it).
If all you're doing is changing the default boot setting it should work (assuming it all works when you manually go to dos/win from the lilo prompt on booting).

I did it in the end using LinuxConf instead of the command prompt

I like that I can change the label 'dos' to 'Windows'... or 'Micros**t' or 'Bill Gates is the spawn of Beelzebub'

You can put LILO on the boot partition and make that partition the only bootable one from fdisk. As long as your BIOS can get at the boot partition, LILO can handle the other partitions.

By the way, another bootloader, Grub, can apparently fool the Windoze installer into not overwriting the MBR. This eliminates the need to run the installer to partition the drive, reboot, install Windoze, then begin installing Linux in earnest. (If only it eliminated the need to install Windoze )

A nice quote from Fight Club...

"When deep space exploration ramps up, it'll be the corporations that name everything. The IBM Stellar Sphere. The Microsoft Galaxy. The Planet Starbucks."

GRUB is quite different to LILO in a lot of ways... but it's still very nice

I use it as it's the 'standard' for Gentoo Linux systems (although one may use LILO if one prefers), and I actually prefer it. It has a very, very nice framebuffer menu mode

To install an RPM package from the command line, just type

rpm -i

If you read the man page, you'll get more info (type man rpm)