Installing Linux, Part 4

I've let my experiment with Fedora Linux stagnate for a while. So I'm going to catch up with the latest version (16) first.

The last time I installed Fedora 15 x86_64 with the LXDE spin. And since the passwords have been lost, I'm going to install from scratch. Also, since I have a large enough USB flash drive this time, I'm planning to use that instead of a CD for the Live Image. This means that I'll first need to download the Live USB Creator.

Once the Live USB Creator is downloaded and installed, I selected Fedora 16 x86_64 Desktop and clicked Create Live USB. It took about an hour to download the image and create the Live USB.

On the machine where I'm installing Linux, I did the following:

1. Back up data to an external hard drive
2. Shut down the system
3. Remove the external hard drive
4. Insert the USB flash drive
5. Press the power button
6. Hit Enter as soon as the first screen appears
7. Hit F12 to choose a temporary startup device
8. Use the arrow keys to select USB flash drive
9. Hit enter

Fedora 16 automatically booted from there. Lots of applications and utilities are provided. In order to power off the machine, first you need to Log Out as the Live System User (use the pull-down in the upper right corner). Then once you are logged out, use the Power icon in the upper right corner and select Power Off.

The Live System User menu also has a Suspend option, which apparently puts the system on standby.

Change of Plan

Rather than install the Fedora 16 with Gnome from the USB flash drive, I decided to reinstall Fedora 15 LXDE from me installation CD. So I boot from the CD/DVD drive.

Then I just follow the instructions from Installing Linux, Part 2. This time I'm more careful about saving the root password. Everything went the same until step 9, where I was notified:

The partitioning options you have selected will now be written to disk. Any data on deleted of reformatted partitions will be lost.

I select "Write Changes to Disk" and the install begins. Everything appeared to go fine. The next step is to log out and then reboot.

After rebooting, I redo the steps outlined in Installing Linux, Part 3. Once I log back in, I'm able to start a terminal. I can also start Firefox, which needs to be downloaded and installed.

Now, back to that ToDo list:

1. How to put the system in standby mode. (Click Logout, then select Suspend. The machine comes back up by just hitting the Enter key.)
2. Find and install Adobe Flash plug-in
3. Find PDF plug-in
4. ITunes?
5. Find VNC Server/Viewer download
6. Find Lexmark printer driver download
7. Download OpenOffice
8. Tunneling software?
9. Customize GRUB
10. Download Perl
11. Download git