fedora installation

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 11:37:19 -0400,
  Jerry Ro <jerrro at gmail.com> wrote:
> hello all,
> 
> I am interested in installing fedora on a laptop x61t (it is, to the best of
> my understanding, a 64bit machine.)
> 
> a few questions I have:
> 
> * should 60-80 GB be reasonable for full installation of fedora?

Just the installed stuff and not accounting for scratch space and whatever
data you have? If so yes. I install a lot of Fedora and now need over 20GB
for / . I have started using 40GB for root partitions.

> * i would like to upgrade to fedora 10 when it is available. should i
> install the beta release which would make it easier to upgrade, or should i
> stick to fedora 9 since it is more stable and still easy to upgrade?

I wouldn't use the beta. In preference use snap3. I think a preview release
is due out shortly. Or you can upgrade to current rawhide (using yum or
snap3).

> * should i be worried about performance with fedora 10/9 on a laptop with
> 1.6Ghz processor and 4GB ram?

That should be OK. If you need 3D acceleration for what you do, that might
be an issue.

> * last, i tried running the Live CD for x86_64 of fedora 9. i had a weird
> experience - fedora loaded, but no text appeared. instead it was all black
> empty spots ("null" font). should i be worried about that when coming to
> install fedora in fully?

There can be video card issues especially if you have an nVidia card. The
ATI support is pretty reasonable in Rawhide right now. (Though I still am
seeing rare glitches.)

> * i read somewhere that someone installed fedora 64bit on a laptop x61t like
> mine, and complained that everything was incredibly slow. once he
> re-installed the 32bit version, it became much better. i would like to use a
> 64bit version still... should i be worried about having the same behavior?

I don't know. But if practical you should use 64bit with 4GB of memory.