Hardware list:

This laptop is operating under Kernel version 2.6.11

Why use Fedora Core 4?

Although Fedora Core 5 is out, and 6 is coming in a few months, after first choosing Fedora Core 5 I decided to downgrade to Fedora Core 4 so that I could get the full potential out of my video card. The X drivers shipped with Fedora Core 5 do not support hardware OpenGL with the Radeon Xpress 200M, and 2D performance is also very poor. The proprietary ATI drivers require X 6.8 and the kernel of Fedora Core 5 is also incompatible with the drivers. I chose to use the i386 version of Fedora Core for a number of reasons, the main one being that I use the built-in wireless LAN and I was not able to find any 64 bit Windows drivers for it. As far as I know there are no big advantages to using the x86_64 version anyway.

Obtaining Fedora Core 4:

Installing:

Wireless LAN

Setting up the network driver should be as simple as typing the following commands:

ndiswrapper -i [.inf file of Windows driver]
modprobe ndiswrapper
ifconfig wlan0 up
iwconfig wlan0 key open [password of wireless network]
iwconfig wlan0 essid [name of wireless network]
dhclient wlan0

For this particular laptop, the driver is named bcmwl5.inf. I put these commands in my /etc/init.d/network file under the "start" section, and under the "stop" section I put:

killall -s 9 dhclient
rmmod ndiswrapper

That way when you type:

/sbin/service network restart

it restarts the network, and the driver is automatically installed at boot.

Video drivers

Suspending to RAM

If you want to enable suspend to RAM, delete sample.conf in /etc/acpi/events (or your computer will shut down when you open the lid), and edit /etc/acpi/events/lidsuspend.conf to look like this:

event=button/lid.LID
action=/etc/acpi/actions/suspend

Then edit /etc/acpi/actions/suspend to look like this:

#!/bin/sh
/sbin/hwclock --systohc
echo mem > /sys/power/state
/sbin/hwclock --adjust
/sbin/hwclock --hctosys
/sbin/service network restart

And type:

chmod +x /etc/acpi/actions/suspend

Now type "/sbin/service acpid restart". Now when you close the lid on your laptop it will suspend and come back when you open it again.

Fixing that annoying logging to the hard drive

I was getting some really annoying logging to /var/log/messages with this laptop when no CD was in the drive. This would could the hard driver light to flicker constantly and the driver to be very noisy. To fix this I edited /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/10-storage-policy.fdi. At the end of the file there is a section that looks like this:

  <device>
    <match key="storage.media_check_enabled" bool="true">
      <append key="info.addons" type="strlist">hald-addon-storage</append>
    </match>
  </device>

Just before that section, I inserted these lines:

  <device>
    <match key="storage.bus" string="ide">
     <match key="storage.model" string="TSSTcorpCD/DVDW TS-L532M">
       <match key="block.device" string="/dev/hdc">
         <merge key="storage.media_check_enabled" type="bool">false</merge>
       </match>
     </match>
    </match>
  </device>

Then I typed /sbin/service haldaemon restart to stop the logging.

Contact Information

Send e-mail to trentgamblin(at)hotmail(dot)com.