References:

• Stan Finley's Fedora Core 4 installation notes and reference site.
• Fedora Core 4 installation guide.
• System Rescue CD a bootable "live" CD with sysadmin and resuce tools.
• Red Hat 9 Manual Pages

Recipe:

• found a set of disks (CDs) that pass the check
• "upgraded" from FC1
• logged in and ran "yum update" which did 263 packages
• X11 would not start after reboot
• enabled "xfs" first with "service xfs start" followed by "startx" which worked
• Used chkconfig to create an entry for xfs and turned it on
• Problem with GNOME desktop tool for "security level" missing in /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/volume.... (also saw some kind of reference to "haldaemon" not starting at boot up....
• problem with slocate (no entry for in group file): checked on another machine: entry should be: "slocate:x:21". Now 'slocate'' -u works.

More details

Down load the iso images from:

cdrecord -scanbus

   The cdwriter on my X20 is at 0,0,0   (but it seems to have made four turkeys and
   now it does not work.... (Sep 12, 2005)

cdrecord -v -eject speed=4 dev=0,0,0 FC4-i386-disk1.iso

speed=8 also seems to work.

The disk is already partititioned:

Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda6               380648    147289    213707  41% /
/dev/hda10             4464644   3727848    510000  88% /home
none                    160012         0    160012   0% /dev/shm
/dev/hda7              3021088   1830452   1037172  64% /usr
/dev/hda9               497829     43193    428934  10% /var
/dev/hda1              6940048   5794312   1145736  84% /dos
/dev/hda5              2613062   1713434    899628  66% /scratch
[dale@think-x20 linux]$

And the existing mounts:

[dale@think-x20 linux]$ cat /etc/fstab
LABEL=/                 /                       ext3    defaults        1 1
none                    /dev/pts                devpts  gid=5,mode=620  0 0
LABEL=/home             /home                   ext3    defaults        1 2
none                    /proc                   proc    defaults        0 0
none                    /dev/shm                tmpfs   defaults        0 0
LABEL=/usr              /usr                    ext3    defaults        1 2
LABEL=/var              /var                    ext3    defaults        1 2
/dev/hda8               swap                    swap    defaults        0 0
/dev/fd0                /mnt/floppy             auto    noauto,owner,kudzu 0 0
/dev/hda1               /dos                    ntfs    defaults        0 0
/dev/hda5               /scratch                vfat    defaults        0 0
/dev/cdrom              /mnt/cdrom              iso9660 noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
# This will mount a usb flash disk. Dale 20030316
/dev/sda                /mnt/usb                vfat    noauto,owner,kudsu 0 0
[dale@think-x20 linux]$

Booted okay from disk #1 but the install checker failed... Check disk #2, it also failed....

Unable to mount a disk. /var/log/messages reports that /dev/cdrom does not exist..

Well, it turns out that the CD drive in that laptop seems to be toast. It also turns out that the disks I wrote on u5 do not work in my IBM 600X but they work fine in u5.... I got a set of disks from Bob Arko that seem to work in the 600X so launched that late this afternoon before I took off.