I concur with Saul & Partha. As long as your BIOS supports booting from an external USB device, you'll be fine. Just ensure that you direct Anaconda (Fedora's installer) to Install grub2 to the MBR of the USB drive, leavng the internal Windows drive untouched.

If your BIOS supports a dynamic boot menu (F12 on many systems), you can select which device to boot from using that boot menu (Internal hard-drive or USB device).

Fedora 17 looks great, by the way. I was able to upgrade from F16 --> F17 on my testing drive without any problems. So far, everything seems stable, zippy and is working without issue.

That looks gorgeous Tux. Might have to buy myself a new computer!

I want a desktop like that, especially the icons across the bottom, I love that.

Tux, are you saying you were able to upgrade to 17 without doing a clean install? Will I be able to do that too?

I need an upgrade too. I need more system RAM and a more powerful video card. Since I can get by on what I have now (barely), I think I'm just gonna wait and save my pennies for a new motherboard, CPU and RAM.


Those icons across the bottom are from Cairo Dock. I did get it working well in Gnome3. You can actually configure it under XFCE and Gnome3 will pick up the changes too.

Yes, I was able to upgrade from F16 to F17 with no problems. I updated from the full DVD install media, rebooted and noticed that it booted with the last F16 kernel. After a full yum update, it installed the latest F17 kernel (3.3.7-1.fc17) and all was well. Considering some of the issues other Fedora users are having with the upgrade, you might not get off so easy. One thing in your favor is that you have a fairly new generic F16 install, as I did, which could make for a smooth upgrade process. You certainly should give it a whirl and if there are problems that can't be fixed, you can always install clean.

F17 will replace GIMP 2.6.x with GIMP 2.8.x but It will keep your hidden .gimp-2.6 folder, with all your scripts, patterns, fonts and such. I noticed that it kept GIMP-Gap but there will be problems. GIMP 2.8 handles lots of things differently.

It's hard to give a realistic review with only a few hours of use but so far, so good.

1/ IDEO : Hitachi..................this is my HDD C/:drive
2/ IDE1 : MATSHITADVD-RAM this is my FDD D/:drive
3/ USB FDD :no idea what this is?
4/ Network Boot : Legacy PCI Device no idea what this is?
5/ USB HDD : Generic USB Disk (or Kingston Plug and Play if conected) this is my E/:andF/: or G/:
6/ USB CDROM : no idea what this is?

3 would be support for an external USB floppy Disk.
4 would be support for network boot (diskless workstation)
5 is support for your external USB hard-drive (this is option you will use to boot into Linux)
6 is support for an external USB CD/DVD drive

I'm not sure what you're asking regarding the various drive letters but Linux doesn't use the same lettering scheme as Windows. Fedora uses sda, sdb, sdc and so forth. Normally, your first physical internal hard-drive is designated sda, with partition numbers following. For example, sda1 is the first partition on the first physical drive on your system. sdb3 would be the 3rd partition on the 2nd physical drive.

When I plug in a USB drive into my PC, it assigns it sdb because the USB drive is the 2nd physical drive attached to my computer.

My USB drive only has one partition so Linux sees it this way..



If I want to install Linux to my USB drive, I would install it to sdb, writing the bootloader to the MBR on sdb. I could then boot to Linux using the dynamic boot menu.

This is the approach you need to take as well. You can determine how Linux sees your USB drive by plugging it in and booting with the Fedora 17 live CD. Open a terminal in F17 and enter the following at the command prompt.

fdisk -l

You can post the output back to this thread and we can take a loot to see how Linux sees your drive layout.

http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora Download the 32-bit
This will be an iso so you burn it to disk.
After that is done, you can reboot click F12 for bios and boot your new live disk. You can take it on a test drive to see you you like it before installing, then Tux will probably let you know what to do next.

Grab the live CD iso from here.

http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora-options

You can use the 64-bit version if your CPU supports 64-bit instructions.

Burn it to a CD and boot from that CD. It will run kinda slow from the CD. The live CD allows you to test drive the distro before installing. It runs kinda slow from a CD so be patient. After booting with the CD, from a terminal command prompt, enter the fdisk -l command and post the output back here.

If you have only one physical hard-drive in your system (sda), Linux it will probably recognize your external USB drive as sdb. As I mentioned, Windows drive designations C,D,E ... are not relevant in Linux.

lol, thats okay, you can explain it better. .

Given GnuTex's desktop, you may want to check this out:

http://www.fuduntu.org/

If you aren't actually disconnecting the internal hard-drive, I recommend (for the 3rd time) that you run fisk -l to ensure you know how the USB drive is referenced so you can direct anaconda installer to install Fedora on the proper drive. Otherwise, you might just overwrite your internal drive.

Assuming that you do discover how Linux is referencing your USB drive, you have a couple of install options with a USB flash/thumb drive. You can create live media, setting aside some space for apps and data, or you can install the full desktop version, but only if your flash drive is large enough. 4gig is probably bare minimum with Gnome3 and a few apps. For some reason, I thought we were initially talking about an external USB hard-drive, not a flash drive.

Banging away on a flash drive with cache and disk swaps will wear out your media, fairly quickly I hear, depending on the quality of the flash memory.
http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Solid_State_Disk

One solution is to set swapiness low when using solid state media.
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showpost. ... ostcount=8

How to create live media in Fedora (see data persistence).. <-- less wear and tear on your flash drive
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_cr ... e_Live_USB

Those are iso images so you'll need to burn them as an image, not as a data file.

In Windows, you can use one of the free utilities like CDBurnerXp or Free ISO burner to create bootable live CDs or DVD install media.

http://www.freeisoburner.com/
http://download.cnet.com/CDBurnerXP/300 ... 09086.html

Or, you can use USB Creator to install the live CD to a flash drive to use as an installer or as bootable live media with persistent data, as I mentioned earlier.

After you download the Fedora.iso, you burn that with the iso-burner to a DVD. Then use that DVD to boot into the Fedora, When you get there it will have two choices, on the left it will say test drive and on the right it will say install Fedora.
If I were you I would just do the test one, then go the the terminal and do the fdisk that Tux mentioned. After that, when you find how it works, then think about installing if all is ok with the fdisk results.

Do I restart my computer now with the disk in place.