Fedora and X61 Tablet

[Jerry Ro]

Hello all,

After a few hours of struggling, I managed to install Fedora 9 on X61 Tablet
without having a CD-ROM, and by using mostly the Vista partition and an
Internet connection. Here are the exact instructions how to do that, in case
of someone interested in it in the future (I think these messages are
archived for look up by google:)

You will need the following:
 - (notice: since I did not have DVD or CDROM I needed two thumbdrives, one
of size at least 4GB for a DVD and the other
   of a smaller size - 1GB)
 - Defrag your vista installation - this is important!
 - Download gparted Live CD iso. I used version 0.3.9-4.
   (http://gparted.sourceforge.net/) and "burn" it on a thumbdrive
   (or CD). You can use unetbootin for that (
http://lubi.sourceforge.net/unetbootin.html).
 - Run the gparted Live CD from the machine (put the thumbdrive
   in the laptop and click F12 when it boots. Then choose to boot
   from the thumbdrive.) Notice: choose the option which says "safe
graphics"!
 - Allocate as much space as you want for the Linux partition. This resizing
may take a little
   bit of time.
 - Download Fedora 9 DVD installation .iso, x86_64 version is good for X61T
as far as I can tell from my case.
 - Put it on a disk on key using unetbootin again (notice: you will need
gparted again,
   so it will save you time not to use the same media for this DVD as well.)
 - Same process, boot this thumbdrive with the DVD. Choose "text
installation" - for some
   reason, Fedora's fonts were not okay at this phase in graphics mode with
X61T that I had.
 - Install Fedora. When asking about where to put the boot loader GRUB for
Fedora, say "boot record"
   and *NOT* MBR. Vista tends to overwrite the MBR whenever it feels like
it.
 - Load the gparted thumbdrive again.
 - Run an Xterm from gparted live cd.
 - Use fdisk /dev/sda (or whatever your harddisk device is) to find where is
the Linux partition and
   Windows partition (for example, by typing fdisk /dev/sda, p, then q).
 - This is where it gets tricky. I had to use two thumbdrives here. Since I
had the one where I copied
  the .iso file, I mounted it after loading the gparted (I placed it in a
different USB port):
  mkdir /tmp/mnt
  mount /dev/sdcX /mnt/tmp
 - With the help of dd, write the boot sector of the Linux partition:
   dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/mnt/tmp/linux.bin bs=512 count=1
 - Reboot and load windows. You may see all kind of attempts to "recover"
your windows or fix it. Don't
   be afraid. You (probably) did not lose any information on the Windows
partition if you did everything
   correctly. Just let Vista get over its panic attack and get used to its
new neighbour OS.
 - Now we are left with using Vista's bootloader and the linux.bin file we
wrote to set up dual boot
   between Vista and Fedora. To do that:
  Run cmd as Administrator (Start -> Run -> cmd, then right click on cmd and
"Run as Administrator")
  copy e:\linux.bin c:\  (where e:\ is where the second thumbdrive is.)
  bcdedit /create /d "GRUB" /application BOOTSECTOR
   This will lead to a response with a very long UID (if everything goes
well.)
   We will refer to it from now on as {LinuxID}.
  bcdedit /set {LinuxID} device boot
  bcdedit /set {LinuxID}  PATH \linux.bin
  bcdedit /displayorder {LinuxID} /addlast
  bcdedit /timeout 10
 - Boot the computer. You should be given the option to load eithe Fedora
(GRUB) or Vista.
   Load Fedora and do the quick setup as requested. In my case, I did not
have X11 loaded after that,
   but everything was run in text mode. To fix that (meaning, use Fedora
GUI), login as root
   and use vi /etc/inittab. Change the number "3" to "5" (there should be
documentation there explaining
   what's going on.)  Another thing I would immediately do at this point is
"adduser [non-root-user]"
   followed by "passwd [non-root-user]" to set its password.
 If everything went well, you should have Vista and Fedora on your X61T
laptop, and next time you reboot
 you can run either one of them with their GUI.

"Keywords for google": x61t, x61 tablet, fedora 9, fedora, linux
installation, thinkpad.

Enjoy!
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