This 9m:27s screencast shows you an installation of Fedora 8 Linux as guest system inside a VMware virtual machine. This includes the demonstration of the installation and setup of the VMware tools package in the installed system. Everything shown of course also applies to a "normal" installation on a piece of real hardware, and not in a virtual machine – simply ignore the VMware parts of the screencast.
The screencast has been edited and some parts have been accelerated a lot, so if you try this yourself it is going to take a lot longer.
Basic computer skills.