Remember I talked about a laptop to cleanup?
Well my first experiments with (k)ubuntu gone bad: the kernel used by 5.10 does not get along well with the 3com PCMCIA card I’m using; there were workarounds, but nothing worked at the end.
Mandrake installed, but got messed up with Xorg at the startup.
Then, I tried Fedora Core… at the start the CD-Rom didn’t start right, it failed the test, died in anaconda install and so on.. thanks to my friend Giandomenico, I was able to get the Network installation wokring using lighttpd server on my main box and mounting in loop the ISO of the rest of the CDs. This way, Fedora installed, the PCMCIA card worked fine with 2.6.11 but it does not work with 2.6.14 after a full yum update, so I just reverted grub to start with the 2.6.11 while I work on the beast. Xorg had to be updated before it started working, but that is now solved, I was also able to get rid of the “postmark” version I was having with Mandrake. At the end Fedora Core installation was mostly fine and pretty interesting.
As the laptop is a ThinkPad using Mwave modem, I had to install tpctl to configure it, unfortunately it was a bit more tricky, the package needed was on RpmForge, and it was not installing because of a missing dep, and there were no packages to install the modules for the ThinkPad, so I had to install that by hand, too.
Also configuring mwave was not so simple: the mwavem package that is told to be the way to use it has a dead homepage, I couldn’t find it on IBM’s website; instead I found that the module was already present in the 2.6 kernel; unfortunately it asked a full I/O port and IRQ configuration, and that required me to reconfigure with tpctl to disable the IR port, that would be unused anyway; I just hope I was able to configure it right because I have a strange traceback on dmesg and when using Fedora’s tool to configure a PPP connection I got a few “ioctl not supported” or something like that on dmesg. minicom seems to open /dev/mwave, but I can’t see anything from that, not sure what the reason is, tho 😐 I’ll give a better try to that when I’ll have another phone line to hook to, mine being DSL would get killed if I connect an analog modem.
I must say, I wasn’t expecting this much from Fedora.. it’s quite usable at the end, also Gnome looks not so bad in that incarnation, I might reconsider those two project in the future, and maybe start suggesting them to n00bs whom I’m not going to admin ever after 🙂
I also have to say that working one entire day with three monitors display the most different things is not funny at all: I had the iBook updating (well it’s still doing, to be honest), this system I was working at, and the laptop I was installing/configuring… I have so much of an headache right now, sigh.
Oh I’m still missing news from my publisher for the payment, last Tuesday my contact told me that all the people at the office responsible for my payment were on break because of a series of local holidays, and they would have returned Monday (today), so he would have told me the status that day… well I haven’t heard of him today, and this situation is starting pissing me off 🙁
