[PLUG] Painless Fedora 10 installation with Windows XP SP3

[Shailesh Khandekar]

Greetings everybody,

I'm new to Pune GNU/Linux Users Group and excited to join these discussions.

I would like to share an interesting fact while installing Fedora 10
in the ardent hope that it would save someone 2-3 days and eliminate
frustrations.

First, let's see the machine that was to be setup. We are talking
about a HCL Laptop with the following specifications:
1. ATI Radeon graphics card, 2GB system RAM, Intel T2080, 120GB HDD.
2. Windows XP SP1 OEM copy with SP3 applied, installed on /dev/sda1.
It was activated over internet using the "Activate Windows" menu in
Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools.
3. Fedora 10 on rest of the partition with the default layout. The
plan was to use ext4.
4. It goes without saying that MS-Windows should be installed and
activated first, followed by Fedora 10. Grub was installed on MBR.

As soon as I installed Fedora 10, two problems were faced:
1. The system would freeze randomly after just 10-15 minutes of operation.
2. When trying to boot in MS-Windows, the Windows bootloader would
flash blue screen and quickly reboot automatically.

The solutions are as follows:
1. For Fedora 10 random lockup problem, upgrade to the latest
successful builds for RPMs kernel and ATI X-Windows drivers, available
on kojipkgs,
rpm -Uvh http://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/packages/kernel/2.6.27.10/169.fc10/i686/kernel-2.6.27.10-169.fc10.i686.rpm
rpm -Uvh http://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/packages/xorg-x11-drv-ati/6.9.0/63.fc10/i386/xorg-x11-drv-ati-6.9.0-63.fc10.i386.rpm
2. For MS-Windows, the solution was simpler than I had imagined. While
booting, press F2 when the HCL logo is displayed to land into BIOS
Setup and choose "Load Setup Defaults" i.e. press F9.

Overall, the experience involved reformatting the hard disk half a
dozen times, a significant number of Google searches, trial and error
and sleepless nights. In the end, the solutions proved to be really
simple, :)

Fedora 10 rocks! It was worth all the efforts.

Hope that helps.


Best regards,

Shailesh S. Khandekar
http://vidagdha.wordpress.com