On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 9:01 PM, Frank Cox theatre@sasktel.net wrote:
I currently have my Acer Aspire One netbook set up with Fedora 11. I would like to change it over to Centos 5.4 if I can.
I downloaded the Centos 5.4 i386 livecd image and made a bootable USB flash drive out of it. Unfortunately, when I boot off of that flash drive, Grub (I guess) immediately turns the screen entirely white. If I hit a key I can faintly see the outline of "Press tab to change options" or words to that effect. (It's very faint and hard to read against the white background.) That bit of text rapidly scrolls off of the top of the screen, so I assume that the rest of the boot-up messages are being printed.
Hitting Ctrl-Alt-anyFkey does nothing for a while, then every keystroke beeps. I can't get to a text terminal and I never see anything other than a completely white screen.
Am I doing something wrong? Fedora 11 works fine on this machine, and I installed that from a livecd.
I'm not an expert on this, but IIRC, the CentOS live CD is not for installation at all, just for running CentOS live on a machine to see if it will work with said machine as if it were actually installed with the stock release drivers. To install, you should use the CentOS installation CD set or DVD.
Also, IIRC, Fedora 11 is at least 3 (or 5) generations of Fedora ahead of the base Red Hat for CentOS 5. Fedora 10 is supposed to be the base system for RH 6.
What you might try is backing up everything on your hard drive, install CentOS (reformatting the drive and all), and then locating any drivers you need that might be missing. This works better for older laptops since the CentOS (Red Hat) 5 drivers are not necessarily the L&G you might need for a new machine, like a netbook.
Personally, I would not bother putting an OS on a netbook that didn't come with it, but I also would not get a netbook at all - they are simply too small for me (vision issues, I like bigger screens, need larger fonts, etc.).
I bought an Everex refurb laptop on ebay recently, for mucho cheap, that, although it is not the hottest, fastest bugger around, has a 15.6" widescreen that is crystal clear, CentOS runs it just as well as the Ubuntu that came on it, and the only problem I have with it now is that the mike and phones plugs don't work., and those are under warranty....
Just my $0.02 or $0.03....
mhr