LinOSX TechnoMash

Well, I finally got around to installing openSUSE 10.2 on my ThinkPad T60. Unfortunately, I was running very low on disk space and couldn’t get any screen captures of the installation process.
In general, the installation process went very smoothely. The biggest advantages of openSUSE 10.2 over Fedora Core 6 during the installation process are:

• Installation picked up my Intel Centrino 3945 and installed the kernel module. Fedora requires you to set this up manually later.
• openSUSE has the ability to connect to the Internet, get a list of add-on repositories and add them during the installation process. Fedora has a screen where you can add the repositories manually during the installation process but this requires you to know the full URL of the repository.
• openSUSE also allows you to install third-party applications like Sun’s Java JRE along with the Centrino firmware and kernel module that Fedora requires you download and install from a third-party provider of RPMs such as Livna or RPMForge.

openSUSE also has better fonts and looks “cleaner” and cripser than Fedora. Proprietary ATI drivers on openSUSE are easily available and installable. The default installation used a VESA driver and set the resolution to 800×600 so installing the ATI drivers was important. Fedora does a better job of providing a hi-res driver but installing the ATI drivers on Fedora is also very easy and well documented all over the place.

I’m not using openSUSE as my primary desktop yet. There’s some hacking to be done with my user settings that would allow the same user id and home directory to be used on both systems. I might remove openSUSE and give Ubuntu a whirl.

The first thing I did after I got the T60 was to format the drive, keeping the rescue partition, and resize the first boot partition to give Windows XP 15 GB. I’ve decided to keep XP on this laptop for being able to do firmware upgrades to the Nokia E61 and to be able to access the Motorola SLVR with the Motorola Phone Tools. Other than that, I don’t need XP and I might eventually do away with it.

I manually partitioned the drive into multiple partions. I created at 15GB partition to hold my home directory as I expect to share it between multipe Linux distributions. I created at 2.5GB Swap partition and a 20GB partition to hold Fedora Core 6.

Installing FC6 was as normal as any Linux distribution goes except it crashed when I tried to customize the package installation. Once I ran a standard development environment install, it went smoothly.

After everything was installed, I got to configuring this puppy. I found there was a bit of manual intervention beyond what was required for my old T40. No big deals other than not being able to get the bluetooth working well enough that I can synch all my contacts and calendars from my Nokia E61 to Evolution. I’m not entirely sure where the problem is but I think it’s somewhere in the libsync libraries. Still trying to find an expert who can help me with this.

Configuring the Intel 3945 wireless was pretty painless – for one specific network. Fedora, in my humble opinion, still does not support location based network profiles very well. And for some ver weird reason, running NetworkManager is the only way to get DHCP working on the laptop with the wireless. It’s very weird, but at least I know I have to keep it on if I want to use DHCP. Conversely, if I don’t want to use DHCP (wired or wireless) and I want to employ a static network configuration, NetworkManager MUST be turned off.

Overall, I’ve been very happy having my ThinkPad T60 running Fedora Core 6 but the little things like synching my phone with my calendar and addressbook are things that Fedora is just not cut out for. I’ll see if i can get it working with Ubuntu when I get some time to install it.

As scheduled, Fedora Core 6 was released on October 24th, 2006.  I’ve upgraded a Dell PowerEdge to FC6 but that was after creating a bootable CD.  Apparently, the diskboot.img that is used to create bootable USB flash drives wasn’t working for me.

Upgrading FC5 to FC6 had a few issues like an i586 kernel being installed instead of an i686 kernel but for the most part, the server is doing everything it should be.  All services, CVS, Apache, Postgres, MySQL, MediaWiki are functioning fine without any changes.

I haven’t been able to get FC6 installed on an external USB HD for use with my MacBook so my ability to play with FC6 is very limited.  I hope to get FC6 running off an external USB HD but all initial research indicates that it "should" work.  I’ll let everyone know if I get it working. 

I will also be accepting donations to purchase a ThinkPad T60 to triple boot FC6, Ubuntu Edgy Eft and OpenSuSE 10.1

FedoraMain – Fedora Project Wiki

I’m far from being a tech guru. I’m just a tech enthusiast who really likes the freedom, flexibility, and tinkering nature of the *NIX world. I’ve been running Fedora Core 2 Test 2 for about a month and a half on a IBM Thinkpad T40 without any problems. I kept the system updated with all the recent RPMs without any serious breakage.

When Test 3 was released on April 26th, I started my download of the DVD ISO using BitTorrent ( see an article about BitTorrent). It took a few days to get the DVD ISO but once I got it, burnt the image on to a DVD, popped it into the laptop, rebooted and did an upgrade from FCT2 to FC2T3 without any issues. Funny thing was that the upgrade took a whole 3 minutes. Probably because I had very few non-Redhat packages on the system and I had all the Redhat packages updated from the Development YUM repo.

So far, the system has been behaving quite well. SELinux is going to require quite a bit of time ( something I don’t have much of ) to understand but I was even able to have my wireless Netgear WG511 card running using the Prism54 drivers on both T2 and T3 along with the Gigabit Ethernet card.

My next step is going to be to get the Centrino driver working. Intel recently released the driver on SourceForge so I’m going to try getting it running. I’ve been looking for some good wireless tools to run my WG511 with different APs but so far, I’ve found switching APs in Fedora to be quite difficult. I’ve also found that having multiple network “Profiles” doesn’t quite work in Fedora. I haven’t yet filed a bug report b/c I’m not sure if I just have something wacky going on or it is in fact a real bug. I need to do some more testing here.

For the most part, FC2T3 looks pretty good in terms of stability. No major issues anywhere. The only thing I’m not too crazy about is that Fedora requires quite a bit of technical knowledge. Hence, it’s not something I can roll out to my dad on his old Thinkpad 600E and still allow him to use his fairly new iPAQ and hotsync. We’ll see, if he feels brave, maybe I’ll do it.

One last thing to the wonderful Linux gurus out there…to be able to get folks like my non-technical Dad on Linux, we HAVE to be able to get AOL for Linux ( or some kind of AOL clone ) out there.