Installing minimal Fedora on my T480 - Part 1

Today I will be installing a minimal Fedora 34 setup on my Lenovo T480.

Fedora is a linux distribution from Red Hat which I’ve been using for some years now. It’s a very stable distro with few bugs, and I like the minimalistic Gnome Desktop Environment. What I dont’t like is that a lot of software I don’t need comes preinstalled with the default Environment. The Fedora Installer offers different Base Environments though, differing in the amount of packages that are preinstalled. My prefered option is installing the minimal environment, and then adding any additional packages that I need.

Prerequisites

• A “target” machine to install Fedora to. In my case, a Lenovo T480.
• A VM or second machine running Fedora 34 for downloading packages for the target machine. This is needed because the minimal install doesn’t contain drivers for the wifi adapter! Packages will be downloaded on the VM and then transfered via USB stick to the target machine
• A USB stick for transfering the packages between VM and target machine.

Installation Process

1. Download the Fedora Server ISO and create a Live installation image using fedora media writer.

2. Press F12 during Boot to boot from the USB. The installation wizard will open.

3. After configuring my machine in the wizard, this is how it looks like.

4. Notice that I selected “Minimal Install” in the “Software Selection”.

5. After a successful installation I log in for the first time. At this point, there is no GUI installed, so all I see is the Linux Terminal and all I can do is issue commands into the shell.

Setting up an internet connection

Installing firmware

Because the minimal installation does not install any wireless firmware, we need to install the packages needed to create a wifi connection ourselves.

Check the current wifi status:

nmcli dev status

No device of type wifi shows up, which means I need to install firmware for my wifi card.

I’m switching to my VM now and download the driver for my wifi adapter from intels website. Then save the driver to my USB stick.

Back on my T480, i proceed with installing the driver:

Insert USB into T480. Check name of usb

lsblk

Create folder for mount point

mkdir usb

Mount usb

mount /dev/sda1 /home/remo/usb

Change into USB directory

cd /home/remo/usb/iwlwifi-i8265-ucode-22.361476.0

Copy the contents of the firmware directory to the /lib/firmware

sudo cp iwlwifi* /lib/firmware

Change to the root directory again

sudo cd /

Unmount the USB

sudo umount /dev/sda1

Reboot

sudo reboot

Installing Networking Packages

These packages will need to be downloaded from my VM to the USB Stick. They should enable networking for the T480.

iw
wireless-regdb
wpa_supplicant
NetworkManager-wifi

My USB Stick is mounted on my VM on `/run/media/remo/2033-4C6E``. I download the packages directly to the Stick with this command:

sudo dnf reinstall --downloadonly --downloaddir=/run/media/remo/2033-4C6E iw
sudo dnf reinstall --downloadonly --downloaddir=/run/media/remo/2033-4C6E wireless-regdb
sudo dnf reinstall --downloadonly --downloaddir=/run/media/remo/2033-4C6E wpa_supplicant
sudo dnf reinstall --downloadonly --downloaddir=/run/media/remo/2033-4C6E NetworkManager-wifi

After the packages are downloaded, I eject the USB from the VM and insert it into my T480. After mounting the USB at /home/remo/usb (see commands above) i proceed with the installation.

Change into USB directory

cd /home/remo/usb

Copy the packages to home

cp iw-5.9-2.fc34.x86_64.rpm ~
cp wireless-regdb-2020.11.20-2.fc34.noarch.rpm ~
cp wpa_supplicant-2.9-12.fc34.x86_64.rpm ~
cp NetworkManager-wifi-1.30.6-1.fc34.x86_64.rpm ~

Change to the home directory

cd /home/remo

Install the packages

sudo dnf --disablerepo=\* install iw-5.9-2.fc34.x86_64.rpm
sudo dnf --disablerepo=\* install wireless-regdb-2020.11.20-2.fc34.noarch.rpm
sudo dnf --disablerepo=\* install wpa_supplicant-2.9-12.fc34.x86_64.rpm
sudo dnf --disablerepo=\* install NetworkManager-wifi-1.30.6-1.fc34.x86_64.rpm

Important: The packages need to be installed in this order, because the latter packages depend on the first. E.g. NetworkManager-wifi needs wireless-regdb, wireless-regdb needs iw.

Unmount the USB and reboot.

After a reboot, I check the wifi again:

nmcli dev status

This time, my home network shows up

DEVICE          TYPE        STATE           CONNECTION
wlp3s0          wifi        connected       Remos_HomeNetwork
p2p-dev-wlp3s0  wifi-p2p    disconnected    --
enp0s31f6       ethernet    unavailable     --
lo              loopback    unmanaged       --

and I can connect to my wifi with this command

sudo nmcli dev wifi connect Remos_HomeNetwork password "network-password"

Now that we have internet connection, we can download the rest of the packages for the installation easily with the package manager. See you on part 2! 👋