Mark Alford's Fedora Core 4 GNU/Linux on an IBM Thinkpad T23
Last modified 2005-Oct-28
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.
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Media check
I found that perfectly usable installation DVDs and CDs consistently
failed the media check at the beginning of the installation procedure.
In the
Fedora Core 4 release notes
they suggest starting the install process by typing
linux ide=nodma at the "boot:" prompt.
When I did this, the DVD passed the media check.
Note, however, that the installer then makes the ide=nodma
option permanent by adding it to the kernel line in
/boot/grub/grub.conf. If you allow it to remain then
you will have a hard time watching DVD videos: xine complains about
excessive numbers of dropped frames.
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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.
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Suspend/Hibernate
In /boot/grub/grub.conf, add "acpi=off" to kernel line
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Shrunken junk-filled console screen
When I resume from hibernation or switch to a console screen (CTRL+ALT+F1 etc)
the screen shrinks to a colored rectangle, with random characters
spread across it. Mohammed Farag
showed me how to fix this:
in /boot/grub/grub.conf, add "vga=791" to kernel line to
use the frame buffer console. Other possible modes
(obtained from this URL):
| Colors | Depth | 640x480 | 800x600 | 1024x768 | 1280x1024 | 1600x1200 |
| 256 | 8 bit | 769 | 771 | 773 | 775 | 796 |
| 32,768 | 15 bit | 784 | 787 | 790 | 793 | 797 |
| 65,536 | 16 bit | 785 | 788 | 791 | 794 | 798 |
| 16.8M | 24 bit | 786 | 789 | 792 | 795 | 799 |
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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.
Wireless
Use a linux-friendly card like the
Dell Truemobile 1150.
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Sound
Sound worked immediately on installation, however it always stopped working
after hibernation. This is fixed by reloading the sound module on resume.
In principle this should be accomplished by setting
RESTORESOUND="yes" in etc/sysconfig/apmd, but
this does not work, because of miscoding
in etc/sysconfig/apm-scripts/apmscript.
So we are forced to
do it manually. Create an executable script
/etc/sysconfig/apm-scripts/apmcontinue:
----
#!/bin/sh
# script to ensure that sound module is reloaded on resume.
# apmscript doesn't do this correctly.
case "$1" in
suspend) ;;
resume)
modprobe -r snd-intel8x0; modprobe snd-intel8x0 ;;
esac
----
This should fix the problem. It is automatically invoked on resume,
and restarts the sound driver.
Streaming windows media video (eg CNN)
Some sites like CNN offer free video streams,
but only in "windows media video" (.wmv) format. You can view these
videos with mplayer.
Install mplayer
Make sure mplayer is installed (needs fedora-extras
and freshrpms yum repositories in /etc/yum.repos.d,
see yum summary.)
> yum install mplayer
This installs mplayer-1.0-0.16.pre7.2.fc4.
Download the mplayer plugin RPM from
sourceforge
and install it. For FC4 it is necessary to use the FC3 package,
mplayerplug-in-3.05-fc3.i386.rpm. The FC4 packages do not
work with the CNN video stream.
Check mplayer on a .wmv file
Download a windows media video
file from the net, and try to watch it using mplayer.
E.g. this
9.5 MB example.
> mplayer file.wmv
It it works then the mplayer plugin should also work, and you will be
able to watch streaming video on the web, including .wmv files like
CNN's video clips. If it doesn't work, then it will give you a lot of
debugging information. You can ignore some error messages like
"Linux RTC init error in ioctl (rtc_irqp_set 1024): Permission denied"
or "Can't open joystick device". Error messages like
"Could not find free Xvideo port" can be dealt with by restarting
X-windows. Look out for error messages saying that it failed to find necessary
codecs.
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Installing codecs
A likely reason for failure is that mplayer
was unable to find the video codecs. The mplayer output will tell you
where it looked: usually /usr/local/lib/win32 or
/usr/local/lib/codecs. To install the codecs,
download the "essential codecs" package from
the
MPlayer homepage. This is a .tar.bz2 file.
(There are also "mplayer-codecs" RPM files available on the web,
but not all of them contain the necessary
codecs to play wmv files. Make sure that your RPM contains files like
"wmv9dmod.dll".)
Now you want to put the codecs where mplayer looks for them,
which you found out in the previous step:
Codecs .tar.bz2 file:
If you have a .tar.bz2 file then you can untar it with
tar -jxf and move the resultant directory to
/usr/local/lib/codecs.
If your mplayer is looking for them
elsewhere, just create a link to make sure mplayer finds them.
Eg, if mplayer is looking in /usr/local/lib/win32 then
make sure there is not already a directory called
/usr/local/lib/win32, and then
> ln -s /usr/local/lib/codecs /usr/local/lib/win32
Codecs RPM file:
If you are installing an RPM file ("mplayer-codecs.rpm", say) then
query it with rpm -qilp mplayer-codecs.rpm
and see where it puts the codecs.
Usually this is /usr/lib/codecs.
If your mplayer is looking for them
elsewhere, just create a link as described above.
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Small points
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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
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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.
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Miscellaneous
For information about keeping your system updated,
disaster prevention, firewalling, etc,
see my Linux hints page
alford(at)physics.wustl.edu
Mark Alford's home page
