| Installing
Fedora Core 5 on a Dell D810 Laptop Tutorial from http://www.ufsdump.org. |
| Hardware: |
| Pentium M 2.13 GHZ Processor |
| 2 GB Ram |
| 80 GB 7200 RPM HD |
| General
Installation |
| Configuring
Intel ipw2200 B/G Wireless |
| Configuring
DVD/Xine |
| Configuring
VMware |
| General
Installation Fedora Core 5 was the easiest install I ever conducted from the RedHat product line. My last installation was FC3 and I had to fight constantly to get sound and video correct. FC5 has a much simpler install and great hardware detection. FC 5 picked up the following devices without any configuration:
After install, I upgraded the kernel to a newer version: # uname -a Linux training01 2.6.17-1.2174_FC5 #1 Tue Aug 8 15:30:55 EDT 2006 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux |
| Intel
ipw2200 B/G Wireless Luckily, Intel puts out drivers and firmware for the ipw2100 and ipw2200 chipsets. You must download 5 packages: the a generic 80211 kernel driver, 80211 kernel driver utilities, ipw2200 firmware, kernel modules, and command line utilities. I am not a "compile from source" guy. So instead, I found binary RPMs of all 5 packages at the site http:///www.atrpms.net/. Make sure you update your kernel. I could not find any rpms for the stock 2154 kernel. Download the 80211 Drivers: http://atrpms.net/dist/fc5/ieee80211/ Download the ipw2200 firmware: http://atrpms.net/dist/common/ipw2200-firmware/ Download the ipw2200 packages: http://atrpms.net/dist/fc5/ipw2200/ Install the ieee80211 kernel modules and command utilities first. After you install these, install the 3 ipw2200 RPMs. After completion, load the modules: # depmod -a # modprobe ieee80211 # modprobe ipw2200 If you get no errors, then add these lines to the /etc/rc.local file and reboot. After you reboot, you should have a wireless device configured. The little green "WiFi" light will NOT show on your laptop. Use the iwconfig command to check to make sure the firmware and drivers loaded: # iwconfig eth1 Warning: Driver for device eth1 has been compiled with version 20 of Wireless Extension, while this program supports up to version 19. Some things may be broken... eth1 IEEE 802.11b ESSID:"hochs" Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437 GHz Access Point: 00:06:25:77:63:8B Bit Rate=11 Mb/s Tx-Power=20 dBm Retry limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Encryption key:XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XX Security mode:open Power Management:off Link Quality=64/100 Signal level=-62 dBm Noise level=-81 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:21 Missed beacon:1 I manually assigned an IP address to the interface and a route. I was able to ping hosts on the Internet: # ifconfig eth1 192.168.1.107 up; route add default gw 192.168.1. # ping yahoo.com |
| Installing
DVD and Xine |
| Make sure FC5 detected your
sound card, if the FC5 install reports "Vesa" driver, you will never
get clear DVD playback. Check to see what card the system has selected
using system-config-display. Otherwise, this was also simple. Using yum, I installed all of the Xine DVD reader packages. Be sure to add the development package. This contains many wrappers and helpers to make Xine function properly. # yum install xine xine-lib xine-lib-devel Run the xine-check utility. This utility is really good at ensuring you have all the appropriate dependencies installed on your sytstem. To further improve performance, I tweak my DVD drive using hdparam to do more read ahead. This will take most (but not all) of the chop out of the DVD playback: # hdparm -d1 -a8 -u1 /dev/hdc I dropped this in /etc/rc.local to catch at boot. |
| Installing
VMware |
| There are numerous posts about
FC5 and VMWare Workstation 5.5. I had no problems. First, I downloaded
VMWare WS version 5.5.2 and used the 2147 upgraded kernel. After I
installed vmware and ran the vmware-config.pl script, everything worked
fine. Since VMWare must compile custom drivers, be sure to install the
kernel source FIRST: # yum install kernel-devel # vmware-config.pl Intel Centrino handles CPU interrupts in some wierd way. I am not a device driver writer, but I was able to Google the following tip. You must tune the kernel to take less advantage of Centrino's battery optimization: # echo 1 > /sys/module/processor/parameters/max_cstate If you don't do this, VMWare will run horribly due to the fact that it will be in a constant sleep state. Once you have done this step, VMWare WS works fine. I have more tutorials like this at http://www.ufsdump.org. |