mburns's Journal: Putting Fedora 12 on a 12" Toshiba

I thought that I wanted a 16", or then a 14", but no it took a trip to Office Depot for me to realize that the Toshiba 11.6" portable met my need for a mobile computer (waving it around at a restaurant table). It is a Toshiba Satellite T115D-S1120.

I do require Linux. But the information online is not sufficient to get the wireless connection working without a wired connection to work with, not for Fedora.

And not researching The Windows partition made for the loss of it - no weighty matter to me though. Linux works now. I now believe that Windows 7 refuses to boot from grub.

The Fedora 12 Live Disks, whether KDE or GNOME, were not a material reassurance, I did not get even the wired connection working with the time I had, and no prospect of wireless was seen. I plowed on regardless.

At the install. I increased the space recommended for the Windows partition and for the swap file, just doing opposite changes on the appropriate partitions. Any idle notion that I had of saving the Windows boot was hopeless, a victim of insufficient planning. I now think that Windows 7 objects to the grub boot manager. So now I have a 30GB ntfs partition up front on the disk drive. I took the opportunity to accept the volume manager and to encrypt its space. It gave me ext4 partitions, thoughts of using btrfs carried insufficient weight in my rush.

After the tedious time spent watching the installation of 64 bit Fedora 12 (from a Cheap Bytes disk) I had some difficulty understanding either the wired or nonwired networking controls - the unprivileged userspace controls, but I eventually got the trick. The installation more or less supported the wired connection (with the included atl1c driver), but maybe it requires privileged controls to nudge it into operation. Then I did another tedious "yum upgrade" command - half of the original 1400 packages replaced.

Using the wired connection, I eventually supported the wireless rtl8187se by:
- first installing (from their www site) the RPM Fusion support. It is RPM files to be installed by this privileged command "rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm", else by Firebird. Without a wired connection, the files must be downloaded on another computer and transferred by media to the wireless portable before the rpm command is given, modified to refer to the local files.
- Second I did a "yum install kmod-staging.x86_64". I was done since yum deduced the other two files that were needed. Without a wired connection, these files must be installed after transfer by media, namely: staging-kmod-addons-2.6.33.2-1.fc12.noarch.rpm and kmod-staging-2.6.32.11-99.fc12.x86_64.rpm.

The last difficulty was getting the userspace network manager to bring up the wireless. It asked for a password, but really wanted a key instead in my case.

--
Michael J. Burns

Virtually always been a problem

[vlueboy]

Wireless has rarely worked out of the box for Fedora and Mandrake, even though kernel support experiments started around early 2006. Even the latest Red Hat Centos (2009's v5.4) needed poking though half of the packages were silently waiting at the expected places... I think my downloaded wireless firmware is what fixed it.

Back when I got Nexenta, OpenSolaris, Slax and Knoppix, I first checked the tray for wireless networks, then ifconfig, and even whether iwspy was installed. Ubuntu is the only one rich

re

[JohnVanVliet]

as a long time fedora user
fedora 4 to fedora 11

Unless you DO LIKE reinstalling the os every 6 months when a new version is released i would not install it .
there is far to much new code in every new release of fedora that the hardware dose not all have drivers .

it is also VERY "cutting edge" and updates can and DO kill the os every now and then .

BUT if you LIKE fixing a busted os and fixing some missing driver and trying to get older code to runn on fedora then by all means use it .

I like doing this so fedo

Re:

[mburns]

Thank you for the comments! I am in fact looking forward to the upgrade game next week.

I have a KNOPPIX/Debian testing partition working again on my big computer after breaking it one year ago with a massive online upgrade. I do not prefer it to Fedora 12, even though it has an older kernel which supports my Audigy card, and again a newer version of OOWriter which supports my compressed fonts.

Re:

[mburns]

I have had a motherboard since 2006 that KNOPPIX did not boot cold, K8V-SE. So it was always Fedora for the cold boot. I tried to use a KNOPPIX partition for its KDE utility, the number of packages, and the ability to play movies. But KNOPPIX had broken fonts (one of which was idiosyncratically right for my work), and 5.3.1 was spectacularly worse. So I retired KNOPPIX in favor of the improving Fedora installation two years ago.

I do indeed do the "yum upgrade" procedure every six months to get the next vers

Re:

[mburns]

After a few months, a Fedora version gets very polished by way of daily "yum upgrades", it seems to me. File conflicts between packages get solved over the first few months. Meanwhile, it takes a few minutes to solve each file conflict with a yum workaround. It is more than a little entertaining for me.

Re:

[mburns]

So now I have a mobile computer running Linux for a few days now with no operational troubles.

Re:

[mburns]

And Fedora has already released a kernel package obsoleting the kernel version documented. Time flies.