Fedora Core 4 on T41

Installing Linux on PC is no longer a daunting task, because after I had it working on my 1 year old T41, I do not really feel like wrting up some detailed installation notes. Fedora Core 4 pretty much works out of the box as installed from the 4 CD-ROMs or the 1 piece DVD. Ironically, the downloading took me longer.

Only a few tihinhs worth mentioning:

1. Intel® PRO/Wireless 2100 Driver for Linux

A year ago I was using LinuxAnt, a wrapper on top of the correspongin Window XP driver for the Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 card. The installation was easy and the wrapper/driver is easy to use (through redhat-config-network) and stable. But the LinuxAnt wrapper is not free. After 30 days you need to buy a license although it is not expensive at all. I was screwed by someone and left the country. For the summer of 2004 I was pretty much on dial-up on the edge of my bed (see old posts dated last summer) and WLAN was not necessary so I did not bother to pay for the driver.

After this much time, things have improved. There is a completely open source solution: Intel® PRO/Wireless 2100 Driver for Linux, following the installation guide included in the download, it was relatively easy. The prosess did not exactly match the descriptions, but again I managed to get it working with the system-config-network utility, even encryption works fine and the wireless link is automatically established on every reboot despite an irritating error message on system startup (something about frequency, it does not matter).

2. Screen resolution.

Somehow the same screen does not as good in Linux as in OS X and Windows, it is always a bit blurry. Besides I was always a little worried while selection the display hardware type during installation. This time I was a bit brave and choose 1400x1050 on the IBM LCD (still selection generic LCD in installation) and it actually looks pretty good on KDE. One funny thing: GNOME desktop looks misplaced after I bumped up the resolution, changing configurations did not seem to help. One day I was bored and used my mouse to drag the task bars around the desktop ... ... After a few spins the problem is gone! The twisted screen corrects itself and everything comes back to normal! Now I have 1400x1050 on GNOME as well as in KDE. No extra configuration is needed.