Mark Alford's Fedora 13 GNU/Linux on an IBM Thinkpad T42

Last modified 2010-Sept-06

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

Summary table

Installation Notes

1. Hibernation

   On awaking from hibernation, the system sometimes hangs with flashing caps light and blank screen. This is particularly likely to occur if the AC power was unplugged at any time while the system was hibernating. The fix (see Thinkwiki ACPI page) is to add the acpi_sleep=s4_nohwsig kernel option to the "kernel" line in /boot/grub/grub.conf.

2. Firewire (video capture via kino)

   Firewire cards with the ALi M5253 chipset remain unsupported, as they have been since the new firewire-ohci modules were introduced in Fedora 7. This is a long-standing Kernel bug.
   Firewire cards with the VIA VT6306 chipset work OK. Here is what works for me: (1) before plugging the Firewire card in to the computer, plug the camera in to the card, and switch the camera on (VCR mode). (2) Plug the firewire card, with camera attached, in to the computer. In /var/log/messages you should see that devices /dev/fw0 and /dev/fw1 are created. Now kino should be able to capture video from the camera.

3. Firefox crashes X server!

   In the original F13 release, and even with the updates until about June 2010, clicking on certain links in Firefox would cause the whole X server to crash. After one of the updates of late June 2010 the problem went away.

4. emacs cannot cache passphrase

   In Fedora 13, the option (setq epa-file-cache-passphrase-for-symmetric-encryption t) in .emacs stopped working. When saving a symmetrically encrypted file, emacs prompted for the passphrase (twice!) instead of using the one typed in when the file was opened.

   This problem occurred because gnupg was removed in F13 and replaced by gnupg2, which behaves differently. The solution is to install gnupg. See Redhat bug 601986. After August 2010, gnupg was added back in to Fedora, so one just needs to make sure that the gnupg package (not just gnupg2) is installed.

   If you previously installed epg from source, make sure that it is also removed (remove the directory /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/epg/), or you may get "Opening output file: integer-or-marker-p, nil" errors when saving a file.

5. mplayer and .flv files

   mplayer in F13 has suddenly lost the ability to play Macromedia Flash video files. This is a problem in codecs.conf. See this thread. Here is the step-by-step solution:

   # Get the source code:
   yumdownloader --source mplayer
   # Extract the source files:
   rpm2cpio mplayer-1.0-0.116.20100424svn.fc13.src.rpm  | cpio -idmv
   # copy the codecs.conf to the appropriate place:
   cp ~/mplayer-export-2010-04-24/etc/codecs.conf ~/.mplayer
   

   Now, edit ~/.mplayer/codecs.conf, and change

   videocodec ffvp6f
     info "FFmpeg VP6 Flash"
     status working
     fourcc VP6F
     driver ffmpeg
     dll "vp6f"
     out YV12
   

   to

   videocodec ffvp6f
     info "FFmpeg VP6 Flash"
     status working
     fourcc VP6F,FLV4
     driver ffmpeg
     dll "vp6f"
     out YV12
   

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