Obviously the first step will be to have a "good" Version of XP. As I am using restore CDs, the entire hard drive will be one big NTFS partition. One of the first things to do with the FC5 installation will be to shrink the initial NTFS partition, after installing SP2, Zone Alarm & AVG.
Boot the first (of 5) CDs and select language, and keyboard. When you get to the partitioning window (next step) select the drive you wish to install to (if there are more than one) and then, from the upper display with tabs to advance/change what is shown, select Create custom layout.
It is at this point that you realize FC5 cannot resize the windows partition! So, we're going to have to use a different approach. Fortunately, we've had lots of copies of Ubuntu 5.10 around which will let you resize the NTFS partition. So let's boot with Ubuntu, create the partitions, and, escape.
Use the default boot (just pressing enter) for the standard setup. Do the language and keyboard (pressing enter to accept the choice). Take the default host name and wait for the partitiong screen to open. Select the bottom choice: "Manually edit partition table".
I chose to delete the backup partition (D:) that the HP restore process created; you may not have gotten one, or may choose to keep it. Your call.
Now, to resize the NTFS partition, select that partition, and move the "active choice" blue line down to "Size:" and hit the enter key. You will be warned that before the resize operation, changes must be written to disk. Use the arroe key to move from "No" to "Yes" and push the enter key again.
The next screen ask what size your "new" partition will be. This is the Windows partition. I chose 12.0 GB leaving the rest of the 80 GB drive for Linux. This was divided up as root (/) 12.3 GB, home (/home) 50 GB, and swap 5.7 GB
This is way too much swap but I'm using the backup partition that windows created at the beginning of the HD for this swap partitinon. In this setup, I have all 4 drives as "primary" (none are "logical").
When you now write these changes to the disk they are actually being written and formatted at this point in time. Whe the next window pops up, it tells you that the base system is being installed. I'll try turning the computer off and then using FC5; one of the riskier approaches (normally I just do a minimal install and then overwrite it with the new operating system, but that is a slower process).
Again, choose to create a custom layout. Use edit to set up the / and /home partitions to be formatted and reassign the same mount points. Continue!
I put GRUB in the default location, select DHCP for the network connection, Phoenix for the time zone, and choose a medium length root password (10-12 characters).
The next screen offers the option of providing an "Office and Productivity" installation. I've always selected stuff in the past, but I'm taking this default approach so that I can see (and show you) what this default suite looks like.
That's pretty much it. You get a couple of screen prompts (I do enjoy "Starting the install process, this may take several minutes"), change CDs as directed and then remove the last one and reboot to create a user, etc.
Wowsers!! For this default thingie, you only use the first two CDs during this installation. Not sure if others needed when adding stuff.
Agree to the license; I (personally) uncheck the SSH and have NO trusted services (this is your computer working as a server). I'm running SELinux (secure linux) as enforcing as well. This should make it pretty safe. Set the clock, create a user and password for user, check the sound, and then LOG IN!
You are now running Fedora Core 5! The default browser is Firefor 1.5.0.1; I know that 1.5.0.2 has been released as an update (there is also a beta of v. 2.0, but let's not go there!) which I'll download and try to install! Well, it installed (I think) but won't run. Time to add the older versions of gcc and libstdc++ using the add software app in "Applications" on the taskbar. I did a search on "gcc" and am adding compat-gcc-32 - 3.2.3-55.fc5.i386, compat-gcc-32-c++ - 3.2.3-55.fc5.i386, and, compat-libstdc++-33 - 3.2.3-55.fc5.i386 to see if that won't fix what is normally a backwards comatibility problem between FC and Mozilla software.
Yup, that fixed it. I now have Firefox 1.5.0.2 installed in my space (/home/dad/firefox) where I don't have to worry about being snookered into giving up root privileges because it wasn't installed by "root" (sys admin). Now I just need to download two Firefox extensions; adblock and noscript.
This has taken a bit less than 6 hours. I'm now going to cheat and copy files from a "backuup" hard drive (old 2nd hard drive) and copy 9.5 GB of music, pictures, and documents back into /home/dad.
Yes, that hard drive is mounted as one partition entitled "/backuup"
the spelling is intentional to make it clear that it is MY backup.
Postscript: Being a LAZY sucker who really does prefer an autoboot to a designated user, I had to go in and change the SELinux setting to permissive in order to get "dad" OK'd for an automatic user upon bootup.