Mark Alford's Fedora 17 GNU/Linux on an IBM Thinkpad T42

Last modified 2012-Oct-06

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

Summary table

Installation Notes

1. Gnome 3: a great reason to switch to Xfce

   The default desktop in Fedora 17 is Gnome 3, a painful step backwards in user-friendliness from Gnome 2. Luckily, one can regain some of the advantages of Gnome 2 (configurability, convenient one-click launching of favored applications, at-a-glance status indicators in panel) by switching to the Xfce desktop.
   • Obtaining Xfce: yum group install Xfce
   • Adding system status indicators to panel:
     yum install xfce4-systemload-plugin xfce4-netload-plugin
     Then right-click anywhere in top panel and select Panel -> Add new Items. scroll down the list and select the Network Monitor and System Load Monitor applets. To make the network monitor work, you will need to configure it to monitor the right network interface (the ifconfig command will tell you the interfaces names, e.g. wlan0). Right-click next to the network monitor applet bars, Properties -> Network device, fill in the name.
     There is a list of available panel applets ("plugins") at goodies.xfce.org.
   • Adding one-click application launchers to panel:
     right click on any item in panel
     Panel-> Add New Items, highlight "Launcher", click "Add", click "Close"
     Right-click new item in panel -> Properties -> click "+";
     scroll down to select app to be launched, click "+", click "Close".
     
   • Which Terminal? There are a few command-line terminal apps to choose from. The default one was ugly. I prefer the gnome terminal. Follow the instructions above for adding an app. Scroll down the list and find a few choices, all called "Terminal" or "Terminal Emulator". Mouse over them to see the hints, and choose the one that is /usr/share/applications/gnome-terminal.desktop
   • Changing layout of apps in panel:
     right click on any item in panel
     Panel -> Panel Preferences -> select "Items" tab, click on item and click on up/down arrow buttons to move it. Panel is updated in real time.
     
   • Emacs key bindings:
     xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Gtk/KeyThemeName -s Emacs

2. emacs cannot cache passphrase

   In Fedora 17, 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) using a "pinentry gtk-2" window, instead of using the one typed in when the file was opened.

   One workaround (see the EasyPG entry in the emacs wiki) is to add the following additional line to .emacs:

   (setenv "GPG_AGENT_INFO" nil)
   

3. Kino

   The kino video capture and editing application is no longer included in the Fedora repositories. Luckily it has been packaged by repoforge.org for Red hat Enterprise Linux 6, which is close enough. Download the package kino-1.3.4-1.el6.rf.XXXX.rpm (where XXXX is your architecture) from pkgs.repoforge.org/kino/ and install it. It needs libquicktime and mjpegtools to be already installed.

Mark Alford's home page

Roger Alford