New Dell Inspiron 9400: From Vista to Fedora/Vista.

[Jim Cornette]

Nat Gross wrote:
..I do not want you to mess up your system so
>> investigate why you have the two ntfs partitions.

> Vista uses two partitions (this, unrelated to dell's own private
> partition), one is a 'recovery backup' partition used by some fancy
> new Vista backup/rollback scheme. Now, this was 10 gig to begin with,
> but being cheap and thinking I won't use windows that much anyhow (the
> main reason I need it is to test my Java software) I reduced that
> partition. It turns out that for the sake of simplicity I should have
> left it at 10 gig, and I have since used windows to set it back to 10
> gig.

It sounds like overkill to have a restore partition for Vista and 
another for Dell software recovery. It should be enlightening if both 
were needed at the same fault incident.
The 75MB partition would make a good /boot partition. The standard 
partition for boot is not fully utilized. I have two kernels and 35% is 
used out of 100MB.


>> Regarding VISTA, I like the resizing tool concept as part of the OS, the
>> /boot partition they now have and the lower privileges for applications
>> instead of admin for everything of helplessness for regular users. I
>> hated NT4 through XP, so the reading of those changes is comforting. It
>> will be sometime before I would have access to Vista though. I never
>> used it yet.
>>
>> Jim
> 
> Woops. The FC 6 installer dvd just ejected... hang on...
> Good news, some hiccups.
> With the partition, using anaconda I deleted the little extended
> partition and created a new large one leaving about 3 gig free, 2 of
> which went for the swap (2 gig ram).

Swap can be a partition within the extended partition. You can have MS 
or various swap or Linux filesystems on the same extended partition. I 
guess there are so many possibilities to schemes for partitioning that 
everyone will have different layouts.

> I did NOT manually create /boot, and true to my hunch the installer
> offered to install grub.

If you did not make a separate /boot partition it will be part of the / 
partition. Grub will be located in the /boot/grub directory off of main.


> However, it seems that the installer also didn't know which is the
> *real* Vista partition, so I manually told it, sda3 and not sda2 as it
> thought.

I assume that it grabbed the first bootable partition and maybe 
referenced the active flag. Vista is post FC6 to my perspective. Anyway, 
at least it was not a major problem for you to resolve.

> Unrelated, the installer crashed every time I clicked on []Extras
> repos. When I realized that was the cause of the crash, I decided on
> minimal clicks and options throughout, and all completed ok.

During the testing phase for FC6, I had trouble with the /extras repo. 
For Fedora 7, all will be one repository. I hope this scheme works out 
better. I like a lot of the packages which FC6 and earlier snapshots 
have available. Soon we will find out!

> Installer rebooted, finished setting up a non-root user, tested sound
> ok, rebooted again.
> grub gave me the option, chose FC6, booted only into mode 3 terminal, no 
> gui.
> Rebooted, gui came up login ok.
> All laptop options nicely installed on gnome menus.
> No kde option on logon screen.
> yum update complains that another process is running yum. reboot,
> still complains.
> reboot to test grub --> windows. 100% ok!
> windows part manager says that the linux partition is empty and do I
> want to format it? ahem.

You might want to hide the partitions from Windows. There are options 
for grub to hide the partitions from the Vista system.

> While typing this message [on another machine] (having rebooted again
> into fc6) I get a beep from the gui updater that there are 233 pkg's
> to update. I guess this sucker locked the yum file. Anyhow, I let the
> gui do it this time.
> whew. I need a break.

There are plenty of updates since FC6 was released. It is slow to 
resolve the large updates. Hopefully it will update in gUI mode without 
killing X during the upgrade. It is best to do initial updates from a 
terminal in case a package resets the GUI. Afterward, it is fairly safe 
to use the GUI updater.


> Thank you all!!
> Feel free to ask anything related to this.
> nat
> 

Hopefully you will get all the specifics ironed out. It sounds to me 
that you have a good grasp to get a system setup without a lot of errors 
during the setup.

Jim

-- 
"We all agree on the necessity of compromise.  We just can't agree on
when it's necessary to compromise."
              -- Larry Wall in  <1991Nov13.194420.28091 at netlabs.com>