Running Centos on a thinkpad…

As the VPS i use is running Centos, I wondered if it would be possible (without tearing my hair out) to run a copy of Centos on my IBM Thinkpad R32 laptop.

As a test, I downloaded the Centos 5 Live CD iso file (available from centos.org) and burned it to a cd.

With my fingers crossed, I rebooted and chose to boot from the cd.

The result is I am now typing this post, on a Centos 5 system, which is running *from the cd*.

Everything just worked, firefox, internet access, sounds the whole lot just works! It can even see the files belonging to XP on the C: drive, so it makes a good emergency boot disk, and comes with plenty of software (spreadsheet, presentation, graphics, internet, email etc)

Now I know it works, I will have to download a full install, and stick it on a second hard drive, that I can just put in the ultrabay enabling me to boot into a unix system when I feel like it.

ps - it also seems to be running faster than my XP was