Re: fc1 laptop sucesses, and failures

["Robert G. (Doc) Savage" <dsavage@peaknet.net>]

On Mon, 2003-11-24 at 01:04, Joe L. wrote:
> I was enticed by Steve P. to upgrade my laptop to FC1
> at the last Silug meeting based pretty much on the
> hope of acpi working out of the box, unfortunately it
> doesn't seem to be that easy. However as promised my
> wireless and my video card seem to be working
> perfectly.  No more vesa for me!
> 
> I have read that I need to patch my kernel, or
> recompile it? I have heard about this but to tell you
> the truth it scares me to death. 
> 
> I don't understand the application of a patch and what
> effect it will have on the existing kernel? 
> 
> Furthermore, are there any GUI compiling tools out
> there that work well? I remember there were some nice
> looking ones in older version? 
> 
> So far Fedora seems to be running well and I am happy
> with it. I followed the apt install instructions from
> the kwicki site and so far so good.
> 
> Thanks for the help everybody. 
> 
> Joe Lillig
> 
> P.S. It would be nice to have a Kernal themed Silug
> meeting. 

Joe,

I installed FC1 on my IBM ThinkPad A22p last week (P-III/M, 512MB,
48G+80G, ATI Rage 128 Mobility, 1600x1200). I backed up all my data onto
the second hard drive and did a custom install of "everything" using CDs
burned from images downloaded from the Silug site.

The installation ran quite smoothly with no glitches at all. In fact, it
took far less time (two hours) than any previous Red Hat Linux release
(five plus hours).

To get up2date to work properly, I had to add the following lines in
/etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources:
 
yum fedora-core-1 http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/1/i386/os/
yum updates-released http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/1/i386/
yum updates-testing http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/testing/1/i386/

The third line is optional and may be commented out with leading ##.

I tried adding "apmd=on" to the kernel line in grub.conf, but my system
refused to boot. Fortunately GRUB allowed me to interrupt Phase 2 and
remove that addition.

On the fedora-users mail list Felipe Alfaro posted a neat way to suspend
my laptop as myself, not root:

     as root:
     # chmod +s /usr/bin/apm

     Then, enable the apmd daemon
     # chkconfig --level 345 apmd on
     # service apmd start

     Now, you'll be able to "$ apm -s" as a normal user.

To resume I just tap the [Fn] key a couple of times -- just like
resuming That Other OS. It's very nice to be able to suspend and resume
whenever I want. As if the life of my Electrovaya PowerPad 160 150Wh
external lithium-ion battery wasn't long enough already, this ought to
allow me to literally run off-and-on all day.

The best customization of all, though, has to be downloading and
installng apt-0.5.15cnc2-1.fr.i386.rpm from freshrpms.net. As I said in
an earlier post, all I had to do then was run 'apt-get update' and
'apt-get xine' to fetch and install all the rpms needed by the xine
multimedia player. I've since installed gxine, xmms, ogle, and synaptic
the same way. The latter gives me a graphical view of apt package
listings. (Past experience tells me to be very conservative when using
synaptic. It's very tempting to use it to upgrade everything in sight,
and that can lead to serious problems.)

--Doc


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