Options For Installing Fedora To Older Laptop

[Timothy Murphy]

On Sunday 30 January 2005 10:03, Robert L Cochran wrote:

> >>My Sony Vaio PCG-F350 laptop (Pentium II 364 MHz, 192 Mb RAM) is running
> >>out of hard drive space. The machine is running Fedora Core 2. It is
> >>still using the original 6 Gb hard drive, and has 491 Mb of free space
> >>left. I'd love a new machine, but I'm loathe to spend the money right
> >>now, especially as one of my kids will soon need to gear up for
> >>university. I figure I can just install a bigger hard drive on the
> >>machine.
> >>
> >>I am thinking of simply popping in the new hard drive and then
> >>installing Fedora Core 3 to it. Does that sound like a good option -- or
> >>will Core 3 grind to a halt? It doesn't have much memory. But the new
> >>drive will have faster rotational speed plus an 8 Mb buffer, so that
> >>might help a little bit. Or should I stick with Fedora Core 2, which I
> >>already know runs slowly, but it does run. I have a Buffalo wireless PC
> >>card that I can use with this baby for my internet connection.
> >
> >I don't think you will have any problem installing FC-3
> >if you put in a new disk.
> >192MB RAM is plenty for this purpose.
> >
> >Also I didn't notice FC-3 was any slower than FC-2;
> >Has someone said it is?
> >
> >I'm running FC-3 now on a Sony C1VFK Picturebook with 128MB RAM.
> >(It used to have 256MB, but the extra memory has failed.)
> >This has a Crusoe 660MHz processor.
> >
> >I'm also running FC-3 on a 300MHz Pentium II desktop with 128MB RAM.
> >I had no problem installing FC-3, but I must admit X is rather slow.
> >
> >Both machines have plenty of disk-space.
> >(I installed a 60GB drive in my Picturebook.)
>
> Thanks Timothy. I'll order the new drive soon. I suppose if I just
> exchange the drives and install Fedora Core 3 from DVD that will save me
> a lot of bother connecting them to another computer first using 2
> special adapters and then copying manually partitioning and formatting
> the new drive and copying the contents of the old drive to the new one.

Assuming your DVD reader can boot the machine
(which you could test before changing disk)
there should be no problem.
I was not able to install Fedora-3 directly on my machine
from CDs after changing the disk
as a problem showed up when trying to eject the first CD.
In the end I installed SuSE-8.0 first,
and used that to get the Fedora ISOs over
and so install FC-3 from the hard disk.

It was suggested to me that I could have used the Rescue CD
to install by NFS.
The problem was that I only have one PCMCIA slot,
which I would be using to read the Rescue CD.
I was told I could have taken this out
and put in a WiFi card before I said how I wanted to install.
I haven't tried that, and am not convinced it would work.

I actually have two Picturebooks,
and installed Fedora on the other after changing the disk
by doing what you mention, copying the disk 
using a 2.5in adaptor on a desktop.

I also tested a USB adaptor on a desktop, which seemed to work well.
I did think of using this adaptor directly on the Picturebook, 
but didn't get round to it.

By the way, the hard disks I installed on my two Picturebooks
are 60GB Hitachi "Travelstar" disks, which run at 7200rpm.
But I don't think the disk speed is relevant on my machines -
if I were doing it again I might try a larger but slower disk.

Incidentally, I wasn't able to install Windows-2000 on my machine
with the original Windows Rescue CDs, which I had.
I asked Sony, and was told that the CDs only work on the machine as sold,
and changing the disk counts as changing the machine.
However, I was able to copy the old Windows partition using Linux dd,
and was quite surprised to find that this worked perfectly.



-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland