Since the Fedora 8 Live CD ran too slowly on my old Toshiba notebook computer, I thought I'd try it on my new HP notebook. It has 2GB RAM, plenty of room for Fedora Live to store its cache.
Whereas F2 allow me to change boot order on the Toshiba, I needed to press Esc on the HP. But, it turns out, I didn't need to do that, because the HP first attempts to boot from the CD drive.
Except that it stalled partway through the boot process, giving me a blank screen with just a blinking underline cursor. I tried it a second time, and this time it worked. The resolution was full.
But there was a serious problem: the input device didn't seem to work -- neither the built-in trackpad, a three-button wired mouse, or the Bluetooth mouse. (The Bluetooth mouse would need to be configured, which I could not do without a mouse -- catch 22.) There was no cursor.
Curiously, the right-mouse button worked. I pressed Ctrl+Alt+Backspace to restart the GUI. This time, I could see icons dimming as the invisible mouse pointer passed over them. This allowed me to perform some navigation. That let me check out the Bluetooth configuration: Fedora had detected the Bluetooth mouse.
Still lots of CD access. But Red Hat software has an alternative to solve that problem: I can copy the Live CD onto a USB drive using an arcane-looking command line prompt. If I can figure it out, then Fedora Live would run faster.
USB Boot Drive
I made a sidetrip through the HP's BIOS settings, and found that dual-boot possibility: the HP apparently can be made to boot from a USB drive.
If this works, then I could install Linux on the 120GB external drive, and then plug in the drive anytime I want the HP notebook computer to boot up with Linux -- leaving the main hard drive unaffected and unpartitioned. I have had sufficient problems with partitioning that I don't ever want to do it again.
I'll have to investigate this further at a later time.
Gusty-ier?
I wondered if Gusty Gibbon would work better on this computer.
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