My new laptop arrived a few minutes ago (5:41PM, according to UPS tracking, after being loaded at 5:20AM — poor baby…).

And the assimilation process begins…

Step 1: boot from System Rescue CD and run the command run_qtparted. Autodetect the mouse (option 1), then select the hard drive. Delete all the existing Windows partitions, then split the drive in half by specifying 50% of the unallocated space. Two partitions are created — one is ext3 for the Linux filesystem and one is FAT32 for the Windows reinstall. This left about 8MB free at the end of the drive for me — no issue, since I don’t even use 10GB regularly, much less 30. Commit the changes, exit, and reboot.

Install order matters here — because I want to use Fedora Core 3’s boot loader (GRUB), I’m installing Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 first. This takes a while, even with a 1.6GHz processor, though I did fully format the FAT32 partition to an NTFS partition (I started at 6:10PM and ended the install at 7:15 or so.) I then started the Fedora Core 3 install.

My hard disk now has a partition layout as follows:

/dev/hda1 (Mount point /, ext3, 27588MB)
/dev/hda2 (NTFS, 28608MB)
/dev/hda3 (swap space for FC3, 1028MB)

I enabled the firewall software and configured it for web server access, then disabled SELinux. Selecting package groups, I chose:

X Window System (no changes from default)
Gnome Desktop Environment (default minus at-spi, gnopernicus, gok)
Editors (default selections)
Graphical Internet (firefox, gaim, gftp, thunderbird only)
Text-based Internet (lynx only)
Office/Productivity (default minus openoffice.org-i18n, planner)
Sound and Video (plus xcdroast)
Graphics (no changes from default)
Web Server (minus httpd-manual, webalizer, plus php-mysql)
MySQL Database (no changes from default)
Development Tools (no changes from default)
X Software Development (no changes from default)
Printing Support (no changes from default)

After formatting and installing, a reboot. I finished the install around 8PM. I set up my own FC3 account, then immediately switched into console. Logging in as root, I changed the init level to 3 to shut down X. I then modified the X configuration to match this xorg.conf, which was generated from another Inspiron 700M.

From there, I type init 5 and get back into X.

Now, I follow the Yum installation instructions posted here, then:

yum -y install libdvdcss
yum -y install xine xine-lib xine-lib-devel
yum -y install apt
yum -y install synaptic
yum -y install fortune fortune-bofh-excuses fortune-hitchhiker fortune-tao
yum -y install totem-xine

The wireless still isn’t functioning, and it’s time for bed, so more tackling this tomorrow.