Shazbot Blog

I recently got a Lenovo S10e, it came with 2 partitions: Windows XP home and a rescue partition. Here is how I installed Fedora 10 (dual boot with XP) on it:

1. I downloaded the Fedora 10 i686 live ISO image and put it onto a USB stick with unetbootin
2. I rebooted the laptop via USB (hold F12 on boot, IIRC) and started the installer.
3. I got the installer to resize my C: partition to ~80GB. I then went for a default install into the free space of Fedora 10. This created a boot partition and an extended partition with / and swap in it.
4. IMPORTANT: I chose to install the bootloader (grub) into the boot partition just created NOT the MBR.
5. At the end of the install I then rebooted into windows. This forced a diskcheck due to the resize earlier. I used bootpart to add an entry in XP’s boot.ini for booting Fedora. This just copies the first 512 bytes out of the Fedora boot partition into a file on the c: drive which is used by the NT bootloader.
   This was done by first just running bootpart (I copied the .exe into the root of C:) to list the partitions, then identifying the # of the /boot partition (let’s call it x) and running
   bootpart x bootsect.fed Fedora

Post install: I booted into Linux, finished off the usual post install tasks then connected up to the Internet via ethernet cable. I ran “yum update” to ensure the machine was fully patched, rebooted, then installed the broadcom wireless drivers as shown here.

Other tips: I recommend setting the properties of the top & bottom gnome toolbars to “hideable” to give you a bit more screen space for large dialog boxes and reducing the default font pitch size to 8.

IMPORTANT: I take no responsibility and offer no support for these steps, if you wipe your laptop, hard luck.

The splashtop instant boot environment still works, I imagine the rescue partition will be a little upset unless I remove the Linux partitions. Sound, wireless (see above), sleep/resume with close/open lid and the camera all work under Fedora 10. Compiz graphical effects can be enabled and work well.

You can get more information on the Lenovo s10 forum, or here.

Popularity: 62% [?]