The system comes with prepartioned disk - four primary partitions, where windows 7 has been crammed to one small 200G partition.
The first partition is 300MB and contains something in NTFS, second partition contains the forementioned windows 7, third is 15G recovery partition and the fourth is 2G FAT32 tools partition.
The new scheme will have shrinked winodws 7 partition and no 2G FAT32 partition. Shrinking is done through windows and so is the obliteration oft he fat-partition. I just simply copied the contents of the tools partition to the windows 7 partition before deleting it.
Windows 7 is a huge beast, after first shrinking it still required a partition of 113,61G! There a files that the "shrinker" can not move because they are used by the operating system. There is still 74G free space on the disk. Well, I will tackle this later.
I've downloaded the gPXE iso-image, burned it to a cd and will use it as the installation medium. The installer crashes on the graphical mode, so the key here is to use "text"-option or "vnc" to get it going.
First installation completed while I was having lunch. Quick test with "init 5" confirmed that display works and installation of 64bit flash-plugin confirmed that sounds and network work. Did a resize for the for the ntfs filesystem and forgot to resize the partition. Boot to the windows 7 confirmed that it still worked. Second boot to linux and deleting + recreating the partition with smaller size caused a bluescreen. The reason for this was probably that I used parted to nuke the partition and recreate it which nuked something else than partition table or changed the starting location of the new partition. Mental note, next time use fdisk instead! Repair with installation cd managed to fix the boot problem.
The second install of Fedora 14 beta is necessary as the free space I got from the second shrinking is between the extended partition and the shrinked Windows 7 partition. The limit for primary partitions is 4 and this means that the extended partition should be resized. I don't know any tool to do this so I just start from the beginning and nuke the old extended partition on the reinstall of Fedora 14. Mental note: next time I will use live cd to resize the windows-filesystem and partition.
The second install went as smoothly as the first one. There was some network traffic so I managed to get bored while waiting the packets to load. Some after installation steps:
- Create a user with -G wheel for myself
- Edit /etc/inittab - replace default boot level from 3 to 5
- visudo - give wheel group super user
- Install 64bit Flashplugin by surfing to youtube and following links. Did the personal install - as there will be no other users on this laptop than me - which means uncompressing the plugin to .mozilla/plugins folder under home folder.
- Install 32bit wine as not trusting it to work with spotify. Spotify works with 32bit wine.
- Freennx-client is still useless.
- avahi-daemon is not able to resolve anything; sudo service avahi-daemon stop; sudo chkconfig avahi-daemon off
- sshmenu-applet requires logoff/logon.
- komodo won't install without setenforce 0 and
might have serious trouble with .gvfs-directoriesor the problem is within gvfs itself. Remains to be tested. Komodo edit-6.0 is not a good idea with .gvfs-directories it clears the contents of the files while saving. Lost two files with it, luckily subversion came to rescue and only the edits where lost. Same goes with Eric and Eclipse, the only editor so far to handle .gvs-files is gedit. - Remmina is great!
- Did not manage to use two external displays with docking station - at least so that one display is in DVI and one is in VGA connector. The Dell display on the VGA connector did not get recognized and got resolution it claimed it could not handle. Probably this is not supported and displays should be connect with some other connector instead. Remains to be seen. Also two different displays is probably not a good idea. Now I have the laptop display and one external display on DVI connector.
- Bluetooth works - I guess - I was not able to browse my Galaxy S phone. Or send files to it but I was able to receive a file from it.
And android notifier ping did not get through. It almos works with ping and some battery events got through. So, it works as badly as it did with previous version of Android notifier. - Fingerprint reader not supported by the driver. Perhaps next year - at least on some Ubuntu