John Smith's Blog

Netbooks obviously have a bit of a flaw when it comes to installing Linux distros - namely their lack of an optical drive. Many distros now offer easy means of making a USB key, but Fedora's process is a bit of a faff-around.

In particular, I was rather annoyed to find that it wouldn't actually fit on the 4GB USB drive I had earmarked for it - as well as the ~3.5GB ISO image, there's a separate boot image that you have to install, that pushes it over the age. Fortunately, I did have some 16GB drives kicking around, and after clearing out some old files, I had enough space for Fedora 14.

Unfortunately, even though I was able to boot from the Fedora'd USB drive on a regular PC, I was unable to convince the netbook to boot from it, despite fidding around with BIOS settings and the like. (Not that that was necessary for Ubuntu.) I did contemplate trying a network install, but ultimately decided to buy my way out of the problem, and acquired a cheap(-ish) external USB DVD drive. As I've got 3 netbooks, hopefully it might get some long-term use, but I can't actually recall the last time I used optical media on a PC other than for installing operating systems or burning backups...

I then had a minor mis-step - which was nothing to do with Fedora per se - in that I tried to boot from an x86_64 DVD, but the Atom CPU in the netbook seemed to only want to work with 32-bit binaries. Given that I have a Mini-ITX Atom motherboard that quite happily runs a 64-bit OS, I'd naively assumed that all Atom chips were 64-bit, but evidently not.

Luckily I'd already got a 32-bit DVD to hand from some time back, so I was able to get Fedora installed with no further problems. Unlike Ubuntu, it defaulted to having a separate /boot filesystem, so I can be sure that I can easily get rid of Fedora should I ever choose to. The boot installer recognized the Windows XP drive fine, but it seems that - for now at least - the Dell backup stuff is still out of reach :-(

On booting Fedora from the hard-drive, I wasn't in any way surprised to find that it failed to use the proper graphics drivers - defaulting to a non-native resolution - and was also lacking in any sort of working networking drivers. Evidently the USB drives were going to come in useful after all...