Tag Archives: Alien

Laptop installations and aliens

Finally, my laptop's finished installing Fedora 8. I probably shouldn't have tried to install it, considering the laptop's an old Fujitsu Siemens Amilo M-6100, with a Celery processor and 128MiB of RAM.

I started the process on Saturday, first discounting using the install DVD, as the laptop doesn't have a DVD drive, then discounting the LiveCD since it has nowhere near enough RAM, and just times out when logging in. Talking with Bastien, he suggested I run it from the boot.iso file from the install disk, and then point that at the full DVD's ISO somewhere (either on an NFS or USB drive, or on the laptop's hard drive).

I duly started to try this on Sunday morning, but ran into some problems. The boot.iso kernel crashed when loading the drivers for the PCMCIA network card, so an NFS drive was out of the question. I handily don't have any USB drives large enough to contain the 3GiB of install DVD either, so that too was out of the question. The final option was to remove the laptop's hard drive, remove it from its caddy and connect it to my main computer using my Dad's Disk Jockey hardware, so that I could copy the ISO straight to the /home partition.

That worked surprisingly well, so I got the installation up and running about midday Sunday. However, since the laptop only has 128MiB of RAM, the whole package installation process only finished this morning, as I believe it had to seek to the DVD ISO to get the package, seek to the swap partition to cache it there, then seek all the way to the installation location and install it, for each package. Then there's the fact it's got less processing power than a reconstituted bacon sandwich…

Anyway, it's installed now, and I can now spend hours tweaking it so it doesn't use all the RAM just sitting on an empty desktop. Fun times!

In other news, I watched Alien on the TV. It was quite a disappointment really, I suppose due to its age, and how all children's cartoons are like that now, or something like that…