Mark Alford's Fedora Core 1.0 GNU/Linux on an IBM Thinkpad T23

Last modified 10 Apr 2004

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

1. Installation
2. Getting pine as your mail program
3. Power Management: suspension and hibernation
4. Keeping packages up to date: yum
5. Internal modem
6. Ethernet/modem network connection
7. Dell Truemobile 1150 PCMCIA wireless ethernet card
8. Getting the sound card working
9. Precautions against future disasters
10. TeX/LaTeX tips and tricks: Japanese characters, laptop presentations, search paths

Notation: I use '----' to mark the beginning and end of bits of text that go in files.

1. Installation

   Red Hat Linux CD-ROMs are available from many sources.

   Installation is straightforward. A few small points:

   1. The mouse is 3-button PS/2 mouse, generic. The monitor is Generic LCD, 1024x768
   2. It is a good idea to have separate /home and /usr/local partitions, so in the future you can re-install a new version of the operating system, without trashing your home directory, or any non-RPM software that you installed.
   3. No need to worry about cylinder 1024 limitations for linux, we will use GRUB which is above such things. So no separate /boot partition is needed.
   4. System clock should be on UTC, to allow automatic implementation of daylight saving time.

   I set up my fstab as follows. This allows anyone to write files on /dos and /win, and allows anyone to mount /mnt/cdrom and /mnt/floppy and anyone to unmount them again.

   ----
   LABEL=/          /                ext3    defaults        1 1
   none             /dev/pts         devpts  gid=5,mode=620  0 0
   /dev/hda1        /dos             msdos   uid=99,gid=99,umask=000     0 0
   /dev/hda3        /win             msdos   uid=99,gid=99,umask=000     0 0
   LABEL=/home      /home            ext3    defaults        1 2
   none             /proc            proc    defaults        0 0
   none             /dev/shm         tmpfs   defaults        0 0
   LABEL=/storage   /storage         ext3    defaults        1 2
   LABEL=/usr/local /usr/local       ext3    defaults        1 2
   /dev/hda9        swap             swap    defaults        0 0
   /dev/hdc         /mnt/cdrom       iso9660 noauto,users,kudzu,ro 0 0
   /dev/fd0         /mnt/floppy      auto    noauto,users    0 0
   ----
   

   To stop the fstab from being overwritten by system utilities that think they know what I need better than I do,

   > chkconfig kudzu off
   

   Some RPM packages I like:
   • xfig-3.2.4-2 and transfig-3.2.4-5 is still my favorite diagramming program.
   • ttfonts-ja-1.2-29 supplies Japanese fonts so that mozilla can display Japanese web pages.
   • ElectricFence-2.2.2-16 is great for finding memory mismanagement bugs in C++
   • fvwm-2.4.14-1 and libstroke-0.4-2: of course fvwm is ancient, but you don't have to wait for it to start up, and you can configure any keystrokes and mouse clicks you like. Stupid metacity.

2. Pine

   Fedora Core 1 does not include the pine email program. This is unfortunate. If you go and find a recent pine RPM from somewhere then it will fail to install, with a failed dependency on libcom_err.so.3. The solution is to download the correct rpm file from this FTP URL.

3. Power management and hibernation

   Both suspend and hibernate work under the out-of-the-box Fedora Core 1.0 kernel, as long as there is a DOS partition.
   For details, see my Red Hat 7.3 notes.
   

4. Keeping packages up to date

   Use yum. See this excellent Linux Gazette guide

5. Internal modem

   The internal modem needed some work: see my Red Hat 8.0 notes. Note that under Fedora Core you need to patch the sources: change line number 2994 of source/serial-lt-2.4.c from

       if ((tty->count == 1) && (state->count != 1)) {
   

   into

       if (((tty->count).counter == 1) && (state->count != 1)) {
   

   But why mess with the modem at all? An external cable modem offers great cost-effective high-speed internet sevice from home. To the laptop it looks just like a regular ethernet connection, so there are no Linux compatibility issues---you can buy any brand you like. Ignore anything the cable company says about needing Windows or a Mac.

6. Networking: DHCP

   To configure networking to use DHCP, just edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 to read:

   ----
   DEVICE=eth0
   USERCTL=yes
   ONBOOT=no
   BOOTPROTO=dhcp
   BROADCAST=
   NETWORK=
   NETMASK=
   IPADDR=
   ----
   

   Then the command ifup eth0 will start the connection and ifdown eth0 will stop it. Or you can use redhat-config-network if you can understand how all the profiles, devices, aliases, etc fit together. For me it only works if the "Nickname" of a device is the same as the device name itself.

7. Dell Truemobile 1150 wireless PCMCIA card

   I tried the LINKSYS WPC11 ver. 4 wireless PCMCIA card, which was never recognized. Then I tried the LINKSYS WPC11 ver. 3 wireless PCMCIA card, which seemed OK, but after running for a couple of minutes it stopped working, emitting syslog messages like this:

     NETDEV WATCHDOG: wlan0: transmit timed out
     hfa384x_tx_timeout: Implement me.
   

   At this point I had wasted enough time and I bought a Dell Truemobile 1150 for $30 on ebay. It works out of the box, no effort at all.

8. Sound

   Sound worked immediately on installation.

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