Fedora Install, Again

Ok, i’m getting plenty of practice here. My new laptop arrived today, and yes, despite the aust web page saying otherwise, it has a thinklight, yay! Don’t know what i’m going to do with the (hefty) monitor stand it came with – but it was part of the deal.

I downloaded and installed FC9 x86_64. I never started windows.

  • The installer graphics were a bit messy, but it was functional. (borders cut off/artefacts left behind)
  • I was looking some stuff up using a terminal, and left it there – then the machine shutdown (finished installation?), but it stayed turned on and it didn’t reboot.
  • Upon a power cycle I ended up with a ‘No Operating System Found’ message. Hmm, not good. Apparently there’s some Lenovo stuff on the first partition – or there was. But I don’t think the installer finished, and grub wasn’t installed, or it was installed in the wrong place.
  • After mucking about a lot to try to recover it I gave up and ran a re-install. This time I installed no ‘install options’ (to make it a bit faster), but made note to check the grub install – onto the MBR. I lost any windows/recovery crap, but I didn’t want it (and it was already lost).
  • Success!
  • No wireless. I installed the madwifi driver for the wireless card – but haven’t tested it so far. I hope it works, using my roamabout card on this would be more of an inconvenience than on my T40.
  • I got the finger print reader going for login – thought i may as well try it.
  • Played with desktop effects, yay.
  • Installed some packages. Hmm, the icons don’t show up in the menu’s. e.g. emacs.
  • IMO the default mouse acceleration is way too fast – maybe its ok if you have ADHD and are on speed, but I can’t keep up. Setting it in prefs kinda works (but not at the login window), but then the gspot is too slow. Oh well.

I played with ADA last night.

3 thoughts on “Fedora Install, Again”

  1. re mouse accel: Does your X log say you’re loading evdev or synaptics? I’ve seen a few machines where evdev ends up feeling way too sensitive, almost certainly because we’re just dumping the touchpad events straight through without any filtering.

  2. Ada is pretty hot. I miss it. What graphics card’s in your thinkpad? I bailed from Ubuntu to Fedora on my z61 with an ATI X1400 which basically works, but can’t do 3d. Or video. Which is annoying.

  3. ajax: no touchpad, only the g-spot (aka ‘trackpoint’) on that machine. It was an usb mouse which was too fast, the g-spot felt about right.

    aidan: some intel thing (‘media accelerator x3100’ – 965?). It was enough to run ‘desktop effects’ at ok if not blinding speed, and it does video too (afaict).

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