Mark Alford's Fedora Core 4 GNU/Linux on an IBM Thinkpad 600E

Last modified 2007-Jun-1

My experiences with other thinkpads and older versions of RedHat are available here.

Linux distributions are available from many sources. For Fedora it is most convenient to get it on a single DVD.

This was a completely straightforward installation. I only formatted the root '/' partition, keeping '/home' and '/usr/local' intact.

  1. Kernel problem

    With some FC4 updated kernels such as 2.6.13-1.1532_FC4 I had problems with the boot process hanging at "Red Hat nash version 4.215 starting", and also hanging after hibernation. The most recent kernel 2.6.17-1.2142_FC4 does not have those problems.

  2. Wireless

    I thought I would be safe using a linux-friendly Orinoco-based card like the Dell Truemobile 1150. This worked with the original FC4 kernel 2.6.11-1.1369_FC4, but something broke in later kernels, both FC4 update kernels and vanilla ones I compiled myself.
    I switched to a cardbus wireless card (TP-Link WN510G) with an Atheros chipset. In principle there are 3 ways to get this to work in Linux: Madwifi, linuxant's driverloader, and ndiswrapper. The Madwifi driver worked for one day, then mysteriously stopped. It could still detect the access point, but no ethernet traffic was passed ("ping 192.168.1.1" gave "Destination Host Unreachable"). The Linuxant driver never really worked: as soon as there was significant traffic on the connection it would freeze up. So far things are working with ndiswrapper. I had to download Linuxant's 16k stack version of the FC4 kernel ("devel" headers as well as binary kernel), then I booted that kernel and compiled ndiswrapper. So far it is working.

  3. Sound

    Sound did not work immediately after installation, and is still not working. I got help from Bob K4MUT and Norman Lippincott, who suggested:
    1. Disable "Quickboot" in the BIOS. To do this, Reboot, holding down F1 key for BIOS menu. Config -> Quick boot -> Disable
    2. Add the following to /etc/modprobe.conf 
      ----
alias char-major-116 snd
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss
alias snd-card-0 snd-cs4232
alias sound-slot-0 snd-cs4232
options snd-cs4232 isapnp=0 cport=0x538 port=0x530 sb_port=0x220 fm_port=0x388 irq=5 dma1=1 dma2=0
----
    For a while it worked, but then it stopped working and I am stuck.

  4. Mount options

    I added the following lines to my /etc/fstab. They allow anyone to write files on the FAT32 partition /win, and /media/floppy and anyone to unmount them again. Flash memory sticks are mounted in /media/mem 
    ----
/dev/fd0	/media/floppy	auto	noauto,users	0 0
/dev/hda1	/win		vfat	users,uid=99,gid=99,umask=000	0 0
/dev/sda1	/media/mem	ext3	noauto,users	0 0
----
    Note /win is mounted as vfat, not msdos, so that long file names come out right. To make sure kudzu won't take the cdrom entry out if you swap out the CD drive, make sure there is no "kudzu" in the options for /dev/cdrom.

  5. Local libraries

    If you want to use applications installed in the /usr/local tree, you should add /usr/local/lib to the library load path. Create file local.conf in /etc/ld.so.conf.d, containing 
    ----
/usr/local/lib
----
    this will then be automatically included by /etc/ld.so.conf.

  6. DVD playback

    I was able to play DVDs using xine, but the playback was jerky and a warning message about "too many dropped frames" came up. I had to use xine -V xshm because the default video driver, xv, just gave a blue screen. Contrary to info on the web, this was not fixed by adding a 'Option "XaaNoOffscreenPixmaps"' line to /etc/X11/xorg.conf. (In fact, adding that line caused scrolling in OpenOffice to become unbearably slow). Also, xine-check gave several error messages which make me wonder whether the xine-libs rpm file is correctly built.

  7. Small points

    1. In FC4 the tcsh prompt convention has changed. If you had a tcsh prompt variable that ended in '%#', yielding a prompt that ended in '>', then that behavior has now changed to '#' because /etc/cshrc.csh now sets the variable promptchars to '$#'. To get back the old behavior (still documented as the default in man tcsh ) just include 
        set promptchars '>$'
      before 'set prompt ...' in your .cshrc or .tcshrc file
    2. In FC4, the 'locate' database is no longer updated by default every night. To restore the old behavior, edit /etc/updatedb.conf and set DAILY_UPDATE=yes.

  8. Miscellaneous

    For information about keeping your system updated, disaster prevention, firewalling, etc, see my Linux hints page
alford(at)physics.wustl.edu

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