Live CDs allow you to test drive a distribution before actually installing it to your hard drive. Booting and running from the CD, or DVD lets you see what works, and what doesn't work when it's coupled with your specific hardware. Something may still not work until you've installed, and have the opportunity to modify a configuration, or install a driver, but a Live CD gives you a good quick look at how things are going to go.
Booting from the Fedora 8 KDE Live CD, in the upper left hand corner of the screen is a "Install to Hard Drive" icon. Clicking on the icon brings up the Fedora Installer, which guides you through the typical installer steps; selecting a keyboard, drive configuration, etc. For the drive configuration, I'm going to select "Remove all partitions on the selected drives and create default layout." With the limited memory on the laptop, I'm also going to choose to turn on swap space immediately.
Next, I'm going to select a time zone, and specify a root password. After that, the installer will format my hard drive to remove the old operating system, and start installing a subset of the available Fedora 8 packages, with KDE as the desktop of choice.
Once the install completes, it's time to reboot the laptop, and eject the CD. When the laptop comes back up, booting Fedora from the hard drive, it's time to go through the first boot setup; accepting the EULA, firewall configuration, SELinux configuration, etc. Don't forget to create a user account, since we all know using the root account as a normal login account is a "bad thing". The next step is to log in using that newly created user account.
At this point, you can go to the KDE Menu -> System -> Add/Remove software to add in any programs that are on the "must have" list, and remove any that are on the "don't matter" list. At 20 Megs for this laptop's hard drive, I don't want to fill it up with a bunch of programs I'll never run.
For the most part, I'm going to try out the applications that are part of the default configuration from the Live CD. I do want to add Firefox for a web browser, even though Konqueror is a perfectly usable web browser. Firefox is in "Applications", "Graphical Internet".
I'm also going to search for a program called "Yumex", a GUI front end to the YUM Package Manager that I'm particularly fond of.
Although I'm trying to use the GUI as much as possible, early on the command line is really the simplest and most expedient method to get install the two programs, and force an update to the operating system. To do this I right clicked on the KDE desktop screen and selected Konsole to open a terminal window. I became root with the command, "su -" to change to the root account and load root's environment. (that is what the dash means, load the new environment). Then I typed the command, "yum install firefox" to install firefox, and "yum install yumex" to install yumex. Once those were completed, I started the update process by typing, "yum update".
After that, it's just a matter of waiting until the laptop gets it's software updates for any patches released since the initial CD was issued. So you're not surprised, there are a lot of them.
note: Firefox will now appear in the "Internet" menu, and Yumex, the YUM Extender, will appear in the "System" menu.
