Preparing for Installation

Eee PC has no CD-ROM, so that you can not install Fedora 12 from a Live CD disk. The best way for you is to download a Fedora 12 Live ISO and write this iso image to your flash drive, and then install F12 with this usb flash drive.

liveusb-creator is a cross-platform tool to do this job, it has an easy-to-use GUI which can ensure the Fedora 12 live CD iso you downloaded is correct, and, it can also ensure you write to the right USB disk. What you need is a 2GB USB disk.

During Installation

It’s quite easy and I think you can handle yourself, but here’s some points you’d pay special attention to.

1) At the screen choosing your time zone, make sure the “system clock users UTC” option is unchecked, in order to keep your two systems both Fedora 12 and Windows XP clocks are the same time.

2) When partitioning your hard drive, please be careful not erase your Windows partition which has some of your personal data. Please mark “Review and modify partitioning layout” optioned checked, so that you will be able to know which partitions will be formatted.

3) You’d better give your /home directory a single partition so that your data will not be lost when you fresh-install your system to upgrade your machine to the future Fedora release.

When partitioning my hard drive, I chose to cover my exiting Ubuntu 9.10 Linux system, and everything is correct when I check my partitioning layout, but I lost all data on my Ubuntu /home directory… this isn’t a matter as these data has been backed up on my laptop.

Another problem I met is when installing bootloader, the installation script says it has a bug, it maybe caused because Ubuntu 9.10 uses Grub2 and Fedora installation script can’t cover it’s files on MBR. I installed the system again and this problem was solved.

Post-installation

The first thing you need to do is to add rpmfusion software repositories when you log into your system. You can find insturtions on how to add both free and non-free repositories on RPM fusion website.

After RPM Fusion enabled, you need to update your system immediately to update all your software to be the lasted. You can do this job by clicking System/Administration/Software Updates.

(Enable Chinese Input)

Chinese Fedora users need a input method to input Chinese words.

Fedora has both ibus and ibus-pinyin preinstalled, a good news is that, I installed an English environment, and ibus-pinyin can be enable on clicks, no need more configuration.

Wireless Driver

Fedora 12 comes with no Eee PC 1000HE’s Ralink RT2860 wireless card driver, I am lucky because I have a G-Sky WIFI adapter, so that I can use it to connect my neighbour’s WIFI network (Fedora has G-Sky’s Reatek wireless chipset drivers by default) and install Ralink’s driver by running the following command in the terminal.

yum install kmod-rt2860

Configure your Mouse and TouchPad

Click System/Preferences/Mouse, and under the “Touchpad” tab, check “Enable Mouse Clicks with touchpad”, this will enable you to double-click an item on your system with our using a mouse, and Eee PC comes with no mouse at all.

Check “disable touchpad while typing” this will be helpful when you’re typing while touchpad always make you annoying.

You can also check “Enable scrolling”, this will enable you to scroll up/down when you move your finger at the right side of your touchpad edge.

Desktop 3D Effects

If you enabled RPM Fusion, and you updated your system to be latest, you should have the latest graphic card driver updated.

Go to System/Preferences/Desktop Effect, and choose Compiz, and mark both “Windows Wobble when Moved” and “Workspaces on a Cube”, then some basic 3D effect will be enabled, try to move a windows or click other workspace to give a try? I know this is only basic effects, but it’s enough, because you don’t have a mouse to operate your system to be more eye-candy

Anything more? Uhhh, I forgot, this is all… If you have any problem, give me a comment below.

It’s been so long a time since I switched to Ubuntu 9.04 before the release of Fedora 11, but now I finally switched back again and installed Constantine on my Eee PC 1000HE netbook. Fedora becomes better, and it works well on this little machine.

I still remember that Red Hat 9 is my very first Linux distribution that I tried when I was on college, although I knew how to install it after reading so many Linux books and magazines in our library, I had a very bad experience, because it doesn’t have a good browser. But things changed after my graduation when I installed a Ubuntu 6.06+Windows XP dual boot system on my office computer, this is the first time I started to use Firefox browser, it worked fine and most of the webpages could be displayed perfectly, and Linux systems left me a good expression since then.

One year later after I had my own job, I bought myself an HP Compaq Presario V3805AU laptop, I always planed to use a Linux distro so that I chose this one, it’s Linux-friendly enough because it has a Red-flag Linux desktop preinstalled. But Red-flag is based on KDE with a cloned Windows interface, and it’s hard to use, so I disliked it so much.

I installed Fedora 9 in my entire hard disk after erased Red-flag, because at that time I didn’t have a broadband internet connection, I had to connect to the internet with a China Mobile EDGE wireless router, so I spent a lot of time to looking for a Linux distro that supports mobile broadband, and finally I found Fedora 9, with GPRS/EDGE internet connections as it’s new features.

Both Fedora 9 and 10 worked perfectly on my laptop, but, it always has some small problems which drove me crazy as I only have some limited Linux knowledges, and can’t solve these problems myself, I switched to Ubuntu 9.04, Ubuntu is more stable as a desktop system, and, what I liked most is its new notify system.

Sometimes I blame myself a lot why I didn’t learn computer science and technology or something related as my major at university, I am so regret about that, because I can’t solve my own Linux computer problems, and I also don’t know what can I do for this amazing operating system.

With so many people’s hard work, Linux is becoming better than ever, especially Fedora Community, they contributed a lot to the Linux kernel and brought us new technology and new features to the Linux world one after another, I can do nothing to help them, but, I use their product, and, I can share my using experience with others, in a hope that they finally start to use it too. That’s what I can do to thank the Fedora community and all Linux developers, that’s why I am back.