2004.09.28 ~22 New notebook, Fujitsu S7010, installing Linux Got a new notebook computer yesterday, a Fujitsu S7010. It's actually a refurbished machine, which may explain some of the variations from the posted specs. Intel Penium M 1.7GHz, 512M RAM, 80G HDD. WLAN is an Atheros adapter of some sort (PCI ID 168c:0013); the built-in ethernet is a Broadcomm gigabit adapter (PCI ID 14d4:165e). This machine apparently also has built-in bluetooth, a nice bonus. There's a hardware kill switch for the wireless stuff on the front bevel. I first booted this machine with Knoppix 3.2 EN, but nothing was usable, not even network. After waiting for Knoppix 3.6 EN to download and burn, I booted that. Suddenly just about everything worked: wireless, wired ethernet, bluetooth, infrared... dunno about modem. Also that SpeedStep thingy kicked in under Knoppix 3.6, whereas the CPU always went full-tilt under 3.2 (read: very very hot). First order of business was to image the hard drive. This took close to three hours, shoveling 80G through gzip then 100baseT onto a remote machine on the LAN. I want to image the hard drive so that I have a known starting point in the event of total hosing. The final archive weighed in at 4.9G, quite a bit more than a DVD+R's capacity. I may either split it into a DVD and CD pair, or just keep it on the desktop's hard drive. Next I resized the NTFS partition until it barely had enough room to breathe. It was something like 9.43G used, so I use qtparted to resize it from 77.8G down to 9.6G. There was already some sort of recovery partition on the drive as well (FAT32 labelled "DISE_BACKUP", apparently for "Disk Image Special Edition"... imo, I don't know what's so "special" about something that could be accomplished with dd(1) and bzip2(1)). After resizing the NTFS, I fell back to familiar grounds and ran cfdisk to partition the drive to my liking. I carved out a 9.6G /, 2 of 4.2G swap (one for suspend, the other for regular swapping), and another 9.6G for /home. Then I formatted them, using Knoppix. Next came about five hours trying to get from a running Knoppix system to a Debian installation. To distill it, it basically come down to this: Installing Debian sarge (testing) from a running Knoppix session. Under Knoppix, mounted what would be /home as /mnt/hda6. Downloaded debian initrd, vmlinuz, and sarge-i386-businesscard.iso to it. Then I set up grub to use this partition: "grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/hda6 /dev/hda". Rebooted off HDD. At the grub prompt, "root (hd0.5)" (which is linux's /dev/hda6), then "kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0", then "initrd /initrd", then "boot". This booted into the Debian installer, which found the relevant .iso image, then things went off from there. In the installer, I then selected the originally to-be "/" to be Debian's "/", since the installer insists on being able to mount / during the install process. At the end of installation, Debian pointed GRUB at proper new root partition. On reboot, the rest of Debian installation went smoothly. Now to pick and choose packages...