Sorry for the raw display. I will adjust this later.

Major issue of this installation is: I couldn't get Disk Druid to use all the space in the 10GB drive. fdisk worked (the linux version, not DOS!). And use 16 bit on display, not 24. More details below....

I bought Red Hat 6.1 for another laptop, but couldn't get the display to work correctly. I could have updated XFree486 and I think that would have done the trick. I figured I might as well get the new linux altogether. I didn't want to buy 7.1 only to find it doesn't work either. So I "borrowed" a fast ethernet connection and downloaded the .iso images. Here's the steps I went through. After all is said and done. I recommend to buy the cdroms (most linux books include them - some $25) - save the time and wear & tear on your hard drive.

I used instructions from http://www.redhat.com/download/howto_download.html

1. Repartition your hard drive. I'm trying to stay cheap so I used Ranish Partition Manager from here:
http://www.users.intercom.com/~ranish/part/
It worked great. I resized the the Windows partition from 10 to 5.5 GB and didn't lose any data. Then I created a FAT16 partition of 2 GB. This was to be shared and pass files between windows and linux. Minor issue: I tried to create a linux and linux swap partition with this tool, but the installation process didn't like it. So I would let the linux fdisk partition the leftover space. I didn't investigate this thoroughly, but there seems to be an issue with the linux kernel being installed a cluster greater than 1024.

2. Create an install disk. If you have bootable cdroms, you can skip to step 5. I had to do this because I was installing from my local hard drive. I used rawrite for windows with boot.img. You can download from ftp.cse.buffalo.edu:
ftp://ftp.cse.buffalo.edu/pub/Linux/redhat/redhat/redhat-7.1-en/os/i386/dosutils/rawrite.exe
ftp://ftp.cse.buffalo.edu/pub/Linux/redhat/redhat/redhat-7.1-en/os/i386/images/boot.img

3. Download seawolf-i386-disc1.iso and seawolf-i386-disc2.iso images to the FAT16 partition. I got them from my old school - seemed to be a pretty fast mirror. Took me about 40 minutes with my ethernet connection. Here are the urls:
ftp://ftp.cse.buffalo.edu/pub/Linux/redhat/redhat/redhat-7.1-en/iso/i386/seawolf-i386-disc1.iso
ftp://ftp.cse.buffalo.edu/pub/Linux/redhat/redhat/redhat-7.1-en/iso/i386/seawolf-i386-disc2.iso

4. Boot with the install disk. It listed /dev/hda5 as the FAT16 partition. It should be the second in the list.

5. Run through the install procedure. Again, when it came time to partition my drive, I had to use fdisk to use all available space. When I used Disk Druid, it would tell me that I have ~2000 MB leftover, but when I tried to create the partition, it would say "not enough space". Then I used fdisk and it worked fine. fdisk gave me some warning about booting the linux kernel on a cluster over 1024, but it worked fine. I created a linux swap and a linux native partition with the leftover space. (Using fdisk, creating a linux swap means creating a linux partition and then changing the disk id - 2 steps).
Finally, I used generic laptop display with 1024x768 with 16 bit. (I tried to force 24 but got some interference on my screen). I used the clockchip setting that was autodetected (second from bottom in list).

Good Luck!
mailto:richard_dunbabin@hotmail.com