Difference between revisions of "Installing Fedora Core 5 on a ThinkPad T30"
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| − | Installation of Fedora Core 5 (Bordeaux) on a ThinkPad T30 ( | + | Installation of Fedora Core 5 (Bordeaux) on a ThinkPad T30 (2366-xxx). |
These notes cover an upgrade (not a fresh install) from a successful working FC3 installation. | These notes cover an upgrade (not a fresh install) from a successful working FC3 installation. | ||
Revision as of 01:28, 31 May 2006
Installation of Fedora Core 5 (Bordeaux) on a ThinkPad T30 (2366-xxx). These notes cover an upgrade (not a fresh install) from a successful working FC3 installation.
Contents
Summary
What works out of the box
- Ethernet
- Onboard display (1400x1050)
What needs to be fixed post-install
- Dual-Head Mode
- NTFS volume mounting
- Keyboard light and brightness control (see notes re TPB and OSD)
Not tested
- PCMCIA Slots
- Wireless
- Bluetooth
- Modem
- DVD / CD-R
- Controlling the fan and system LEDs
- What else?
Details
Getting the system booted
I simply inserted the FC5 DVD into the drive and booted into it, and selected a few items to take me into an upgrade-in-place.
When the upgrade completed it booted immediately into FC5.
My system was configured for dual-boot using GRUB (not NT) as the primarly bootloader (MBR) and chainloading back to Windows when necessary. This makes linux installation easier. Returning from the NT bootloader back to linux requires copying the grub boot block into NT, which can be done using commonly-available instructions.
System Updates
Although presented in the System Tools menu, the Red Hat Network and Red Hat Network Alert Icon utilities appear to have been deprecated. They don't seem to work at all.
Instead, you can now use System Tools : Software Updater to download and install the latest updates for Fedora. This will take quite a while the first time you do it (the DVD is already quite out of date).
Many web sites also suggest adding external repositories so yum has additional places to look. FreshRPMs and Livna seem to be the most common, with conflicting opinions as to which should be chosen.
What needs to be fixed post-install
Dual-Head Mode
This was very important for me as I use an external Dell 2000FP monitor (1600x1200) as my primary programming monitor. When I configured dual-head mode, the screen layed out properly for two pages (spanning mode) but the external monitor never activated.
An experimental ATI driver update was found [[ http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/testing/5/i386/xorg-x11-drv-ati-6.5.8.0-1.i386.rpm | here]]. I followed the directions suggested [[ http://www.redhat.com/archives/rhl-list/2006-May/msg02069.html | here]] and my external monitor works now in spanning mode with 1600x1200 resolution. Hopefully this note can be removed or updated when this newer driver is promoted into the regular FC5 updates system.
