2 questions
 

MOUNT ISSUE
ON my drive I have a partition that consists of my old win98se system. At times I want to access files from the past. Rather than mount it when I want it, I'd like to have it mounted whenever- so in etc/profile.d I created a file media.sh which contains "mount /dev/sda3 /media."

Works fine - but whenever I run the terminal program it starts by saying "This can only be done by root". Apparently starting terminal activates this command file. Is there a proper way to do this?

DISTRIBUTION ISSUE
I want to put f18 on an old 32 bit system with a CD. In past I've downloaded an iso file for a live 32 bit CD. I'm unable to find one for f18. I find f18 64 bit download and DVD downloads but have not yet located the 32 bit CD based iso file - if there is one.

How do I get f18 onto my old system?

Files in /etc/profile.d are executed when you start a BASH shell. Also, the simplistic mount command you specified must be run as the superuser.

You can add an entry to your /etc/fstab to have the filesystem mounted on each boot.

See:
for more information.

Hope it helps.

For the second question you could perform an install using a minimal boot iso as long as the old 32 bit system will have access to a decent internet connection. The Installation Guide talks about this briefly in Chapter 2. Obtaining Fedora. I often use the link http:/download.fedoraproject.org, it will bounce to a mirror near you. The boot.iso can be found on the following path, fedora/linux/releases/18/Fedora/arch/os/images/boot.iso (note arch would i386 for example).

Note that 'old' is relative. My machine is old, actually from the Jurassic era. With a 2.8GHz P4 with 1GB RAM and an nVidia FX5200 card, even F16 ran dreadfully slow as does Ubuntu Natty and Debian Wheezy.

So depending on what the OP means by old, F18 may actually be quite unusable.

Just an FYI, I'm running F18 on a 1.5GHz VIA Esther processor with 2GB RAM and onboard graphics. It did not like Gnome 3 with gnome-shell (would run at 85-90% CPU at all times), but Fallback mode is acceptable. If they ever get rid of Fallback mode, Gnome will be history on this machine. Would have to move to Mate, Xfce or LXDE for example.