Contrary to the posts I have been reading in forums, serial mice are very much supported in FC5. The release-notes state they are not supported in the install, true enough, but they still work normally with GPM and X.
Monthly Archive for July, 2006
I am sure other users, like myself, have tried to replace the stock FC5 splash screen and found that the start-up icons are mis-aligned on the replacement screen. I googled and found 2 other users posting of the problem, but no solution. It turns out the problem is deliberate.
I like gnome, but the preferences applets are fairly limited. More setting are available to be played with using gconf. If you know what elements you want to change you can use gconf-tool. You can navigate all settings using gconf-editor or if you you are uncomfortable navigating all the settings you could try gtweakui. Use yum to install gconf-editor or gtweakui.
Running gconf-editor as a regular user allows you to modify settings for a specific user account. Running gconf-editor as root allows you 2 more options. “New Defaults Window” allows you to change settings for all users. “New Mandatory Window” allows you to change settings for all users, and prevents them from changing the settings, very useful if building a corporate or education SOE.
I have been using a very old lucent (orinico) pcmcia wireless card on my laptop. FC5 has great support for this card, but the card itself is pretty outmoded, and I wanted an 802.11g card.
Being a good linux citizen I researched all the cards available from my local retailer to see which had support, and decided on a dlink DWL 630g. Unfortunately I didn’t research enough. Previous versions of this card use the fairly stable and well supported madwifi drivers, but the current card wearing this model number uses a Ralink 61t chipset. Campanies changing chipsets and keeping the same model numbers is one of those particularly annoying things that gets me cranky. But I had already paid my money and now just wanted to make it work.
There is an open source project to support the rt61 chipset, but it’s still in beta, so I thought I would try the ndiswrapper approach.
I have always felt running binary windows network drivers on linux kind of a black magic solution, and the fact the it worked at all kind of bothered me. But I didn’t expect it to work as well as it did. Read on for brief howto. Continue reading ‘Hooray for NDIS Wrapper’
Yesterday a friend asked me to setup FC5 for him on his laptop, amusing in itself as he works for Redhat.
Most things worked as perfectly as they had for me on other laptop installs, but I had 2 issues, both of them important enough to be show-stoppers. Wireless wasn’t detected, and contrary to the posts I had read, suspend and hibernate were not working.
The wireless issue really bugged me. This was a centrino chip, surely it should work. For some reason, I don’t fathom yet, the kernel supports the ipw2100 and 2200 chipsets, but the supporting software is not included. With the livna repo enabled I just installed the packages:
# yum install ipw2200-firmware
Once installed the wireless worked fine. I enabled NetworkManager:
# chkconfig NetworkManager on
Once I restarted the machine, wireless worked perfectly, and I was impressed to see all WPA standards supported. NetworkManager is fantastic.
The laptop would suspend and hibernate, but the the display driver would not resume correctly, installing the FGLRX driver from ATI fixed that.