I just bought a Toshiba NB205-N210 netbook. I chose it because of Toshiba's support for Linux, and their international warranty service.

It has XP on it and I want Fedora or some other RH-based distro on it.

Problem is, though, it does not appear to be able to boot from an external device. The choices in the BIOS are HDD and LAN. It can read and write an external DVD, but does not recognize it as a bootable device. I don't have a bootable USB flash drive to test.

Can I install a distro on a spare 2.5" drive using another machine and drop it into the netbook?

TIA
Jim

According to link the laptop can boot from USB.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=7777869

Thanks. UNetBootin did the trick. Once a bootable USB was detected, it appeared on the menu.

FC11 Live booted well. In the brief test, the only flaw was tapping on the touch pad did not work. The buttons did though.

Further testing revealed that at random intervals (a few seconds to several minutes) the system (FC11) would hang an wait for input from the touchpad. Touch the pad and things would proceed for a while. This happened in both with and without the GUI (Gnome).

FC11 was installed by mistake. I intended to install Mandriva but forgot. Mandriva is behaving quite nicely.

The only 3 negative comments on the hardware/bios so far are
-- The touchpad cannot be turned off. This may be a hardware/firmware defect.
-- The keys have a flat surface. They really need a bit of curve or raised edges.
-- An external DVD with a bootable disc inserted does not always show in the boot menu.

Other than that, it's a very nice little machine.