an amazing experience with Werewolf - Day 1

This series is donated to mention my personal experience of installating Fedora 8 Linux on my Lenovo T61 laptop, if you are interested with Linux too, and are a new-b just like me, i hope my article somehow helps in some way.





So my laptop crashed 10 days before the debut date of Fedora 8, though i was very tempting to wait 10 more days so i could taste the newest fedora, the urgency of using my laptop during the middle of my sophormore semester destroyed my little wishful thinking; i put back the old fedora 7 and got busy since then.
fall passed, and winter came. after catastrophic final grades, the sweet winter break started; it wasn't long before i swapped the fedora 8 dvd into my laptop and finally give it a try, though the process of the trial, just like my other experiences with linux, wasn't that smoothy.

Shorter than i expected, the first problem was encountered a few seconds after the installation process began; after the medium check, a blue screen with weird numbers and symbols appeared. reluctant to say, i immediately thought about the software Mr. gates is, (or was) proud of, and being amazed cuz it looks like somehow windows transmit the disease of "blue screen of death" onto linux. boot and reboot my laptop a few times obviously didn't solve the problem, so i googled it (still seemed like the fastest way of solving a problem in Linux); and the problem looked to be pervasive among the eager fans of fedora 8. i was told to press "tab" while choosing installation methods at the "Welcome to fedora 8!" screen, and to add some extra parameters at the end of the choice so the whole thing becomes: "vmlinuz initrd=initrd.img nofb askmethod". the "nofb" was probably set to disable some features and "askmethod" tells the computer to ask user the place where the media is from, like dvd drive or hard drive...etc
(appreciation goes to Danzor at fedoraforum)

the rest was pretty much like fedora 7, basically just keep pressing "next", although i did take my rights to design the hard drive layouts. on the last page, i did what a installation guide of fedora 7 told me to do, 1) take out totem mozilla plugin in "sound and video" from "applications". 2) added kde environment 3) added windows file server 4) added system tools and 5) added chinese as optional language. at the end, i jogged down "/root/install.log"...on this article, so i could view the installation progresses later. after everything was set, I hit the magic "next" button

unfortunately, the installation process still took as long as the fedora 7's, and even longer than XP's (despite the saying of "...this may take several MINUTES" on the screen, so in the meanwhile, other than wasting my dear life, i went to applebees at 11:30 at night (yeh, happy hours!!), had 20 piece chicken wings with friends, and came back to see what's going on.

got back some forty minutes later, and the process was finished. rebooted the computer and fedora 8 came to live on my T61! though screen was fuzzy and several functions were not working, it looked much better and more functional than i first installed fedora 7!