Installation manual

Preparation Work

2. 1. Removing the Stickers

Once upon a time computers were delivered unadorned. Nowadays you will ﬁnd anynumber of stupid stickers

glued to the machine in prominent places, informing you about what kind of operating system the machine was

originally designed for and what brand of processor it sports. Until a fewyears ago, these stickers were only

mildly adhesive and could be removedwithout too much hassle.

Not so with our newThinkpad. After peeling offthe stickers, we are left with twostickypatches of super-adhe-

sive glue. Toremove these, we put a fewdrops of parafﬁn oil (a.k.a. petroleum) on the glue, wait a little bit and

then brush awaythe resulting jelly with a paper tissue. The remaing oil traces can be removedwith a mildly alco-

holic windowcleaner,which in its turn can be removedwith a damp paper tissue.

2. 2. Backup of the Thinkpad Service Partion

We want to install a pure Linux box without anyWindows partition. So we would liketohav e some backup ar-

chive,from which we could later on re-recreate the original Windows setup — just in case. IBM in their inﬁnite

wisdom decided, however, not to provide anyCD-ROMs with this Thinkpad but install an invisible “service par-

tition”, from which the Windows system can be easily restored — and Linux just as easily destroyed — just by

pressing <F11> at boot time. There are, however, noprovisions whatsoeverfor the unlikely case of a complete

hard-disk failure. Toremedy this situation, we would liketomakeanarchive copyofthis service partition.

To this end, we boot from the Debian installation CD-ROM, mount this invisible service partition and copyits

contents into twosuitably sized directories on the main partition, from where we can burn the contents on CD-R.