Installing Linux (Fedora 19 Desktop Edition) on my Old IBM ThinkPad Laptop

Today I took a dive into the Linux Operating System arena, having been a devout Microsoft Windows dude for ages. I decided to install Linux on my old IBM ThinkPad laptop, with intention to zap-out and erase the existing Windows XP that was running on it. Here is screenshot of my Linux desktop after completing the installation.

Getting started, first off I noticed while browsing through the web, a plethora of free Linux distros and flavors that are available (including Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, etc). For my purpose, I just did a quick assessment of the various options and chose to go with Fedora, which is the free, opensource, community-driven Linux distro, being backed by Red Hat, Inc.

The installation process took the following steps:

1. First, go online and download a Fedora ISO image - go to http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora, click on the ‘More download options...’ link and choose and download ISO image for one of the desktop options. I went with the Gnome-based default Fedora Desktop.

2. Since the target laptop was an old-ish barebone-machine which doesn’t have a CD drive, I had to make a bootable USB thumbdrive, to use for the install. To do that, I first downloaded (from https://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator/) and installed Fedora LiveUSB Creator tool for Windows. Then run the tool, browse and selected the Fedora ISO image file I had downloaded earlier, select the target device (i.e. the USB drive) and click the ‘Create Live USB’ button. 

The tool extracts the live ISO image and writes it to the USB drive, and also installs the bootloader onto it.

3. Next, I took the bootable USB thumbdrive over to the target laptop, start it up, interrupt the startup process so I can go into the PC’s BIOS settings (on ThinkPad, just hit the blue ThinkVantage button pretty early during POST) and change the boot order to make the system seek to bootup from USB first before attempting booting from HDD. Save this new boot order and restart the system. On rebooting, the system, as expected, loads the Fedora Linux OS from the USB thumbdrive.

4. Go through the installation wizard; for my case I decided to reclaim the full HDD space and make a new partition and have the OS installed on it. Also, created a password for the root user account and added another admin user account. Installation took about 10mins and I rebooted to a brand new Fedora linux OS 19 Desktop.

5. What next? Poked around the OS, see what it has and where things are at. I noticed it installed Firefox web brower ootb. Good thing! But since I also like Google Chrome, I decided to go ahead and have that installed too.

6. To install the latest version of Google Chrome, I went with the option of using the YUM package manager, as this will enable it install any required dependencies and also make installing subsequent new updates for Chrome, pretty easy.

7. Add a new yum repository file with the following lines:

[google-chrome]
name=google-chrome
baseurl=http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/rpm/stable/$basearch
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub

and save it under /etc/yum.repos.d/google-chrome.repo (Note: switch to root in order to write to this directory i.e. run command “sudo -s” and enter root password.

8. Run the command: yum install google-chrome-stable - This goes through and downloads and installs all the dependent packages along with the latest version of GoogleChrome browser.

9. To open Chrome from the command line, run ‘google-chrome &’

10. And voila, good-old IBM ThinkPad laptop now runs on Linux with Google Chrome as my default browser.

11. Next, I’ll go grab and install packages for my Java software development tools - JDK7, Eclipse, Apache Tomcat, Maven, etc.