Fedora Core 6 - Dell Inspiron 6400

To install Fedora Core 6:

1. Get Inspiron pre-installed with XP Home from Dell.  I kept XP Home - I use XP for a few situations and want to play some Windows network games.  Besides, I've got a license for the thing; not going to throw that away easily.
2. Run the System Rescue CD and use qtparted to resize the partition table.  For some reason my initial attempt to use the latest version of SysRescCD (0.2.19) wouldn't recognise the intel framebuffer using any of the settings; I used the 0.2.17 version and it worked fine.  At the boot prompt type 'intelfb800' to get the frame buffer working so you can use qtparted.
1. Leave partitions sda1 and sda4 alone.
2. Resize hda2 (the NTFS partition) down to 15GB (as I'm not going to be using this for much. (I chose to give FC about 33GB of space.
3. Wonder why there was a spare 7MB of space at the end of the drive and use qtparted to move the sda4 partition 'later' in the disk to merge the free space together.
4. Don't forget to commit all your changes and leave it time to write them!
3. Reboot and insert the Fedora Core Network Boot CD (only about 6MB of CD).  This was the same procedure as on the 9300 but I thought I'd spell it out here.  You need to have another machine on your local network that can be an NFS server.  The procedure is:
1. On your NFS server, put the path to '/path/to/fedora/core/6' in /etc/export:
   echo /path/to/fedora/core/6 192.168.1.0/24(ro) >> /etc/exports
   (if it isn't there already).
2. You'll also need to start NFS and make sure that outside clients can reach the NFS server (open up sunrpc, nfs and ports 600-1023 for TCP and UDP, because NFS seems to use both in my experience).
3. Mount the first disk of FC6 using loopback:
   mkdir /mnt/image
   mount -o loop /path/to/fedora/core/6/FC-6-i386-disc1.iso /mnt/image
   
4. Burn the network boot image from this image onto a rewritable CD (no point in making another coaster):
   cdrecord dev=/dev/hda -driveropts=burnfree -v -eject -dao /mnt/image/images/boot.iso
5. Boot the laptop off this CD.
6. When asked for the installation method, use NFS.
7. You'll be asked to configure your basic network options.  I usually turn off IPv6 here because I have no IPv6 services anyway.
8. Enter your server's IP or domain name and the /path/to/fedora/core/6 in the boxes and hit OK.
9. If, after a couple of seconds, you see a message from anaconda, you're up and running; if not, you probably aren't talking to the NFS server.  Check your situation with wireshark or ethereal.
4. I configured the disk space this way:
1. Don't let the installer configure your disks automatically - do it manually.
2. Create an extended partition in the free space space.
3. Create a /boot partition (ext2) of about 100MB.
4. Create an LVM in the rest and set up the swap and root partitions inside LVM.  I did this to allow me to install other Linux distros in the future.  I also rename the volume group 'mainvg' instead of 'VolGroup00' and the logical volumes 'swaplv' and 'rootlv' instead of 'LogVol00' and 'LogVol01'.  Easier to find next time!
5. Choose your packages.  Install repositories if you want to, but I chose to do mine later.
6. Go through the install and first boot processes and you're up and running!

What worked out of the box:

• Suspend and resume.  Very very nice!
• "Display Effects" - i.e. aiglx.  Hooray for Intel for opening up their graphics architecture so that the Open Source community has full OpenGL 2D and 3D acceleration without tainting the kernel!  Not quite as many effects, nor as controllable, as I'd like, but it's early days.  Not having to install anything special in order to get this working is a real plus.  And I get 800 FPS in GLXGears in 1680x1050 resolution.  I can't wait to try the Linux versions of Quake 4 or Unreal Tournament.  (Make mental note: bug the designers of Supreme Commander for a Linux version).
• Bluetooth - although this means that it can see my phone but can't browse it in any meaningful way.

Problems encountered and fixed

• The native resolution of the screen I bought - 1680 x 1050 - isn't actually in the Video BIOS so it isn't recognised by FC6's setup program.  In order to get this working, you have to:
• Install the 915resolution driver from the Extras repository:
  yum install 915resolution
• Check what resolutions you have with '915resolution -l'.  This gives the BIOS modes (e.g. '5c') for each screen resolution (e.g. '1920 x 1440, 32 bits per pixel').
• Then put a line in /etc/rc.d/rc.local that sets one of the modes you aren't likely to use to the resolution you want:
  echo "915resolution 5c 1680 1440" >> /etc/rc.d/rc.local
• You also need to edit the screen resolution in the Xorg config:
  As root, vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf, find the Modes line in Section "Screen" Subsection "Display" and edit it to include your resolution(s).  I put 'Modes "1680x1050" "1440x900" "1280x800"'
• Log out and log back in and your display should now be at native resolution.
• The Intel Pro Wireless 3945b requires the drivers from the FreshRPMs repository:
• If you haven't already got FreshRPMs installed:
  rpm -ivh http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/fedora/linux/5/freshrpms-release/freshrpms-release-1.1-1.fc.noarch.rpm
• Then install the drivers for the wireless networking:
  yum install ipw3945d ipw3945-firmware dkms-ipw3945
• Start the DBUS message system:
  service dhcdbd start
• Start the NetworkManager system:
  service NetworkManager start
• Set both of these to start up automatically:
  chkconfig --level 345 dhcdbd on
  chkconfig --level 345 NetworkManager on
• NetworkManager takes over managing your wired and wireless connections.  It also remembers your wireless access points and their WPA passwords and logs in to whatever network is closest to you.  I've found occasional problems when your laptop is about a foot away from your WiFi router, where NetworkManager continually sees another connection that it thinks is stronger (this will happen in real life when you have one wireless network with multiple access points).  If NetworkManager continually disconnects and reconnects every five to ten seconds, just move away and it should be fine.  If it disconnects and reconnects every second or so, you probably haven't started DBUS.
• I've also found that the FreshRPMs packages for the firmware seem to be out of date.  You'll know if you've got the out-of-date drivers because they hard-lock the machine after too much activity, and the kernel log will list microcode errors usually involving DMA.  Grab the latest ipw3945-ucode archive from http://bughost.org/ipw3945/ucode/ and put the ipw3945.ucode file in the /lib/firmware directory.  Then restart the system using:
  service ipw3945d stop
  rmmod ipw3945
  modprobe -v ipw3945
  service ipw3945d start
• Hibernation loses the settings on the video card (i.e. you have to run 915resolution again).  I haven't yet found where to plug this in to the hibernation-awakening process.  Use suspend and resume for the moment.
• CPU speed adjusting requires the appropriate kernel drivers.  Unfortunately, a bug in anaconda causes some Pentium-2 and above systems to be given the i586 kernel rather than the i686 one, and the former doesn't come with the aforementioned drivers.  You need to make sure you're using the latter kernel in order to get on-demand CPU speed scaling.  After you do your fresh install, do a 'yum install kernel.i686' to get the latest i686 version before doing a 'yum upgrade' to get all the latest packages.  You may still need to install cpufreqd to get the scaling working automatically.

Problems I'm still working on

• I haven't yet got the memory card reader to recognise MMC and xD cards (at least).  I can see the device in lspci, but nothing happens when I plug a card in (and I've tried all the logical insertion directions).  As far as I can see, the driver only recognises SD cards at the moment.

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Last updated: Monday 5th February 2007.