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Fedora 8 Linux on a Gateway MT6916 Laptop
Wednesday December 5 2007 02:21 AM
I bought a Gateway MT6916 notebook at Circuit City yesterday and I've been working getting Fedora 8 to run on it. Here are my notes so far:
Because of the layout of Vista on the hard drive, Vista won't shrink the main partition to give up more than about 40GB even after disabling system restore, the page file, and hibernation. Supposedly you can use a proprietary tool (go through a very risky procedure with gparted) to shrink the partition. I decided to just reinstall Vista onto a smaller partition using the installation DVD that came with the laptop. I needed to install the webcam driver/app from the website and some of the other bundled software might be missing but I didn't need it.
After installing Fedora 8, I made the following tweaks:
- After logging into X, from the commandline I ran "xrandr --output TV --off". Without that, X would hang whenever I clicked "Lock Screen" or left the machine unattended for a few minutes. To avoid doing that every time I login, I added that line near the top of /etc/gdm/Init/Default.
- Made the wireless network connection not start on boot because I have a WPA network. System > Administration > Network > wlan0 > Edit > uncheck "Activate device when computer starts".
- Enabled and started the NetworkManager and NetworkManagerDispatcher services via System > Administration > Services. Without that, it couldn't connect to the wireless network. With that, I get prompted for the WPA password. I also get prompted for a password to add something to a keyring, but I click "Deny" on that dialog and I still get connected to the network after a few seconds.
- To get the webcam working in Ekiga, I built and installed the uvcvideo kernel module. Unfortunately Cheese (and gstreamer-properties) can't access the webcam, probably because the driver currently only supports mmap() access, not read() access. Note: Ekiga currently crashes when I try to make a call but that seems to be audio related.
Sound output works. Recording from the microphone doesn't seem to work by default, but I haven't looked into why yet.
I have suspended and resumed successfully a couple times, but it seems like I need to switch to a text virtual console (Ctrl-Alt-F1) and back to X (Alt-F7) after resuming in order to see anything. If I don't do that the display is so dim, it looks like it is off.
I haven't played with hibernation yet.
I'll update this blog entry as I have more info. If you have any tips or tricks related to this laptop, email me (dean at brettle dot com) and I'll probably add them to this blog post. Eventually, I'll try to put together a full report for Linux on Laptops.
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