I have this laptop running Windows XP® but, even though it is equipped with an Intel Core Duo® at 1.66 GHz with 4 Gb of RAM, sometimes it makes me think I’m using an ancient computer from 20 years ago. So, I wanted to try Linux on it to see if I could give the PC a new life. At the same time, I didn’t want to remove the existing OS, as the primary user of the laptop is my wife, which really doesn’t know how to live without the programs she is used to.

The solution: to install Linux alongside Windows, in what is called a dual boot configuration. Here is a brief account of how I did it, and some of the challenges I had to face.

If you don’t know that yet, I’m a a big fan of the Fedora distribution, so that is what I immediately decided to install. And since release 13 was just released, I took the opportunity to test drive it, so to decide if it was suited to also upgrade my main machine, which is used as a proxy and a WEB server for the family network.

Having decided what to put on the laptop, I went to the Fedora WEB site to download a copy of the distro. I choose to download the live CD version of it, so I could test it for compatibility before actually install it.

Here is a link to the download WEB page: http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora

Once I had the .iso file on my desktop computer, I burned a CD with it and started working on the laptop itself.

First, I inserted the CD in the laptop and  restart it, to make it boot from the CD. From the main screen, I selected the option to boot Fedora from the live CD. Once the boot process was completed, I found myself in the Gnome desktop from where I ran a number of simple compatibility tests, to make sure that Fedora was compatible with the laptop hardware:

• check that the display was capable of showing the right resolution, and that the 3D acceleration was handled correctly;
• check that the network interface was working fine and that it was possible to access the LAN and the Internet;
• check that the sound was working properly;
• check that the extra peripherals connected to the computer were working fine (i.e. printer).

Since everything seemed OK, I went to the next step: free up some space on the hard disk to install the new OS. To do that, I used gparted while still on Linux from the live CD.

Unfortunately, when I tried to shrink the existing NTFS Windows partition, gparted told me that it didn’t have enough space to do so. Very odd, since at least 70% of the disk was empty. But, in fact, gparted had it right: my disk was 70% empty, but it was highly fragmented, so there was not enough contiguous space to shrink the partition. I had to shutdown the computer, remove the CD, and reboot the laptop with Windows, then recall the defragmentation program and have it run 3 times, before the disk was finally enough defragmented that I was able to shrink the NTFS partition. I then left about 50% of the disk available to Windows and the remaining 50% unused.

Done that, I finally selected the icon on the Gnome desktop to start the actual installation, which conducted me through a number of choices:

• Language.
• Basic storage device, the hard disk.
• Host name, the name the computer is known in the local network.
• Time zone, and here I made sure to uncheck the box “system clock uses UTC“. Reason for that is that Fedora and Windows both try to update the system time on the motherboard, but Windows always does it in local time, so I had to make sure Fedora did the same to avoid incompatibilities when switching back and forth between Windows and Linux.
• Root password, which is the password used by the system administrator.
• Make the Linux installation use only the free space on the hard disk. Here I also required to be able to review the partitioning layout, so to be able to have the /home file system reside on a partition of its own, which is always better to do to simplify future upgrades.
• Change label used by the boot loader to identify the “other” OS as Windows XP.
• Set Windows XP as the default OS, to make things easier for my wife.

The installation procedure then required the system to be rebooted. After that, the procedure went through a series of steps to complete the configuration. It basically asked to do the following:

• Create one or more user, as you don’t want to use “root” for regular activities. And for that I created two users, one for my wife (in the hope that she will use Linux from time to time and get used to it) and one for myself.
• Set the time, which I required to be set automatically across the network.
• Send the HW profile of the PC to the Fedora Project. This one step is not necessary, but it is a nice thing to do, so that developers know what kind of PCs are used out there, and that helps them to tune up the OS in future releases and make it work better and better.

And there was it: the installation was completed and the PC was ready to use. I just made some small final little adjustments to please my taste:

• Installed Thunderbird, as my primary e-mail application.
• Ran the update tool to install all the latest fixes.
• Setup the system to access the Internet through my proxy server (squid)
• Installed the RPM Fusion repositories, which make available lots of multimedia programs and codecs.
• Installed the Samba services, so to be able to access the Windows shared disks in the home network.

In conclusion, all that took me a good half day of work, but it was worth, as the laptop, with Fedora on it, now runs much faster and smoother than when it runs Windows. One more evidence that Linux is a much lighter and stable OS than Windows.