fedora 9 and the eee, not much luck
Fedora 9 linux operating system got out, and we didn’t have much luck running it on the eee pc…
How to install fedora 9 on a usb pendrive
First problem, you will need at least an 8GB usb pendrive or SDHC card (I have a 4GB USB). Fedora 9 needs just over 4GB because of a huge uncompressed system image.
Here are some instructions about how to get it installed:
- Boot from the live CD your production computer.
- Insert your USB pendrive
- You may need to unmount your USB drive in order to install on it. Go to Applications/ System Tools/ Terminal and type
umount /media/disk
if the name disk wasn’t asigned to your usb, you can type
cd /media
ls
and replace disk by the result.
- Now, you can click on the install to hard drive icon from your desktop
- On the picture below, you will find an example of what to do
You have to be careful with this step, you could format your regular hard disk or mess up your boot sequence. Your usb will also be formated, so be sure to back up your data first.
So, you need to uncheck your standard hard disk, and leave only your usb drive for installation (sdb in our case). Choose also your usb as the drive to boot from.
Clicking on next will continue the installation process.
I’m sorry I don’t have more supstance to present you about Fedora 9, but in the meantime, you can find a system customized for the eee pc and based on fedora on this page, eeedora.
Update: Thanks to jaboydjr, who shared with us an installation method for fedora 9, which can indeed run on the eee pc. Respect!
May 15th, 2008 at 8:24 am
I’m doing something different that gets around one of your problems, but I do have Fedora 9 running on my EeePC.
I bought an EeePC so I could use it with a bootable external drive. What I have is a 160G SATA drive in a USB 2.0 enclosure. Of course, that’s room for a full Fedora 9 install. I’ve now done installs from the i386 DVDs for both Fedora 8 and 9; 9 is much cleaner for this kind of install.
I did the install in a VMware session. Configure a VM to use the DVD ISO file and USB but no virtual disks otherwise. Shortly after powering on, add the external drive from the VM menu. It should then be available in the partitioning screen(s).
In the partitioning screen, don’t use the default layout - either do a custom layout, or modify the default, to get rid of the LVM PV. This step was a showstopper with Fedora 8 until I tried it with a normal ext3 root partition without LVM. For this application, I prefer not using LVM anyway, since I like to be able to use this drive on other systems - that’s why it’s external; LVM gets in the way of the mounting process for external drives.
So, the drive has 3 partitions: an ext3 /boot, an ext3 /root, and a swap. A critical point is that since these are usb-storage, they need to be labelled and/or the UUIDs have to be used. Fedora uses the UUIDs, but a Fedora 8 install can be altered to use either UUID or filesystem labels (in the initrd’s init script and /etc/fstab in the installed root partition). I used mkswap and e2label to write filesystem labels with Fedora 8, but I’m just using the UUIDs Fedora 9 set up by default.
The only change necessary due to the VMWare install that I’ve seen is that the X driver gets set as ‘vmware’ and needs to be changed to ‘intel’ (in /etc/X11/xorg.conf). Otherwise, Fedora 9 comes up cleanly.
Haven’t checked all the drivers yet, but the ethernet driver is in the Fedora kernels since 2.6.24, and F9 has a 2.6.25 kernel on the DVD, so it doesn’t need to be separately installed (or the kernel updated) as for F8.
I didn’t try doing the install directly on the Eee, by the way; a VMware session is just easier.
May 15th, 2008 at 8:33 am
I should mention that I’ve also done Fedora 8 installs to a 4GB SD card; same process, but I limited the packages I selected for installation, to make sure
I wouldn’t fill up the card. I haven’t tried this with F9 yet, but I’m guessing
it would work.
May 17th, 2008 at 4:52 am
Brilliant insight jaboydjr!
Sorry for the delay with the approval of your comment, I was off a few days for an important exam (but I succeeded ;)).
Thank you very much for the method, It will surely be useful to everyone! I have two external hard disks, so it is just perfect.
I wish you a warm welcome!