dimpas - Post a comment

I didn't install any Linuxes on laptops in the last 5 or so years, so that's quite novel to me. For the time being, I'm going for a double boot.

• Prepare the harddisc:
  
  
  
  • make a bootable USB flash drive with gparted on it; spcifically, use these instructions on a Linux machine;
    you might need to have syslinux tool installed (it's a Debian) package. Use fdisk to toggle the bootable flag on the USB flash. My flash drive (Imation) came already FAT16 (also known as FAT) formatted
  
  
  • do disk defragmentation on the laptop under Windows (perhaps not needed), and shut it down.
  
  
  • plug the flash drive into the laptop and boot from it
    (hit F2 to put you into the BIOS menue after you powered it
    on, and change the booting sequence in the boot menue); you don't need to enter any extra options.
  
  
  • resize the NTFS partition (I resized it to 10Gb),
    ane create the usual partitions for Linux on the empty space: root, swap, home (I've chosen xfs file system for
    root and home, about 21Gb each)
  
  
  
  
• install Debian Linux (etch/testing distro ) on the laptop:
  
  
  
  • Follow the instructions here with an extra twist of using in the end fdisk to make the flashdrive bootable.
  
  
  • Installer hang when it was preparing apt sources; reinstall, skipping this part, then reboot into the live system and enter /etc/apt/sources.list manually;
    then it worked OK. Remaining installation done just by using apt-get (I hate dselect...)
  
  
  • tips for fine tuning, such as suspension to harddisk (that works fine, although I don't know how to make it work via gnome), are e.g. here
  
  
  • (Added Dec. 13/06) Managed to get wireless working without building a custom kernel, only by using Debian tools: installed 2.6.18 kernel image, ieee80211 package (i.e. WLAN support), and then followed instructions here. Have yet to test it extensively, but at least it sees now a (protected :)) WLAN of a neighbour)
  
  
  • more to be added