Entry 48 - It Was a Good Day to Break Something Valuable

It Was a Good Day to Break Something Valuable

It Was a Good Day to Break Something Valuable

Installing and customizing Fedora Core 3 on an IBM Thinkpad

Class is out for the holidays, work is well. . . work. I Have been poking around with this website once in awhile; starting much, finishing little. But just recently, however, I had a hankering to do something risky involving an expensive piece of equipment and a soldering iron. Yeap, My old laptop- the IBM Thinkpad i560 - (all 465.5 MHz of Celeron goodness) needed an overhaul. I started off this process ass-backwards as always - as any engineer worth his salt will tell you (if you get him liquored up), it is the only way to fly. I decided to go whole-hog on a Linux distro; I thought about Gentoo, or maybe Debian -- I even considered Slackware for about 15 seconds - but being for the benefit of my own sanity (and less and less these days for my own vanity), I chose to give the newest release of Fedora Core a shot. (In the past, I had installed both Fedora Core 1 & 2 on this very machine, and it was both a learning experience and a pain in the tucus to keep it usable on a daily basis.) I digress; There is a lot more crap to get to in this story. First things last! Install the software!

It is ridiculous sometimes -- what a human being will do out of pure laziness and a desire to avoid the general public. This particular instance involves 1 (one) CD burner that died, replaced thereafter with 1 (one) DVD burned that also died. Six months ago. I like to test myself, you see. I could have easily strolled into Best Buy or CompNazi and picked up a burner within these 180 days, but I am MacGyver.

Yes. I am also a git.

So it goes. I was 3 gigabytes into a bitTorrent of Fedora Core 3 when I suddenly realized I had nothing to burn the ISO's with. I was quite buggered. Simply wishing and blowing kisses at these things was not going to get them on the laptop. So, I did what I always do - I turned to the village wise-man! On Google I found the niftiest article; it detailed a method of installation that I had not heard of before - over a network. Yes, all sorts of options: HTTP, FTP, NFS. It was great. I immediately felt redemption. Smiling happily, I read further about this process -- it seemed simple enough, so I had a sneaking suspicion that there had to be a catch.

And yes, it was a big one. Fedora Core 3 has a boot disk image available, but one look at the size told me that I was in trouble. I muttered some obscenities and soldiered on, looking for a way to get to this promised land they call the network install. After about 3 hours of trying everything under the sun to boot my poor bastard of a laptop, I tried something unorthodox. I popped in the Fedora Core 1 CD.

[F1 - Main] [F2 - Options] [F3 - General] 

[F4 - Kernel] [F5 - Rescue]
boot: linux askmethod_

The CD spun up, and to make a long story short, the kludge worked. I type to you now from this very stable linux laptop, and I thoroughly enjoy having the option of using another operating system to putter around the internet. A couple people have asked me how I managed this, so I intend to write it down, with only a hint of bloated verbosity and a just a sprinkle of patent condescension. My only hope is that you eventually get as much bizarre enjoyment out of Gnu/Linux as I do - Lord knows, Gateszilla needs to be taught a lesson in humility - and a great way to do that is by supporting alternative OS choices. It might not beat Windows in the end, but the competition might make some of those tyrants out at Redmond use their heads when they sit down to code.  Anyhoo. . . enough out of me. ONTO the HOWTO.

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