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Using Fedora Core 3 on ThinkPad T40

(I no longer possess T40, thus this page will no longer be updated.)

I have been using Fedora Core 2 on IBM ThinkPad T40 (2373-75J) for several months (see here for information on installation and configuration of FC2), and recently I have (bravely) upgraded it to Fedora Core 3. Below is my memo on the problem I encountered during the process. What I did was an upgrade, so some may not apply to a clean install.

TODO list

  • Modem (I haven't used a dialup connection for years. I'll set it up someday...:)

Work done

Using VMWare 4.5.2 on kernel 2.6.11

Although VMWare Workstation 4.5 doesn't officially support Fedora, it has been running fine on my FC3. Starting from the kernel version 2.6.11, however, it doesn't work any more (vmware-config.pl fails with an error) since some kernel functions have been deleted. (I hear the newer version of VMWare works fine, but I cannot afford it yer.) After upgrading to a 2.6.11 kernel, I have downloaded vmware-any-any-update90.tar.gz, extracted at some directory, and ran ./runme.pl as root. It made the necesasry modifications to VMWare and ran vmware-config.pl. Then it worked again. I do not know where this patch came from or what it actually does, so do it on your own risk.

As far as I know, there are two solutions other than upgrading to VMWare 5. First is to patch and recompile the Linux kernel following this post. The second, which I took, is to use an unofficial patch to VMWare called "any-any patch", which you can get from here.

Clock problem with APM suspend/hibernation in kernel 2.6.10

A bug was introduced a bug in kernel 2.6.10 which screws the clock after APM suspend/hibernation (as well as ACPI?) You can read the posts to the linux-kernel mailing list in here, here, and here. This bug is also filed in the Fedora bugzilla here.

I'm using APM (read here) and had the same problem. As far as I read the thread in the mailing list, the problem is solved in kernel 2.6.11-rc1. As a Fedora user, the only solution so far is to revert the change made in arch/i386/kernel/time.c and recompile the kernel by yourself. Another option is to keep using a 2.6.9 kernel package, but it has a security vulnerability... 04/17/05: The problem has finally been fixed in the kernel 2.6.11-1.14_FC3.

Adobe Reader 7

For a long time the development of Acrobat Reader for Linux appeared to have stopped at 5.x, but now the newest version, Adobe Reader 7 is available here. RPM version seems to work without a problem on FC3.

Default paper size in dvips

If you use dvips to convert a dvi file to a postscript file, you may find the file doesn't have an appropriate top margin. The reason is that the default paper size in dvips in Fedora is set to a4paper, not lettersize. This seems to be a policy of RedHat distributions (see here for discussion), but since other tetex tools (e.g., latex) uses lettersize as default, this could be a problem. The solution is either to use the '-t letter' option of dvips every time, or run the 'texconfig' program as root to change the default. In texconfig, enter 'dvips', select the global settings, change the paper size to letter, then exit.

Formatting problem in urw-fonts

If you are using a tool like enscript and a2ps, you'll find the output contains too big fonts. The bug seems to be in recent version of urw-fonts, and here is a bugzilla entry. A simple workaround until the bug is fixed is to use the old urw-fonts-2.1-7 package for FC2, which you can find here. The following command will overwrite the latest version of urw-fonts with this old package: 
# rpm -Uvh --force urw-fonts-2.1-7.noarch.rpm


You may want to save this rpm package, because each time you run automatic update tools such as up2date, yum and apt-get, they try to re-upgrade the urw-fonts package to the latest version. Of course you can configure these tools to inhibit the update of urw-fonts, but then other packages that depend on urw-fonts will fail upgrades due to the dependency check. Such packages include ghostscript, xpdf, etc. You can query which packages in your system depend on urw-fonts by the following command.



$ rpm -q --whatrequires urw-fonts

Therefore, one option is you just want to let the upgrading of urw-fonts when necessary, and repeat the downgrading process above. The bugzilla entry says the bug is supposed to be fixed in urw-fonts-2.2-8 when it comes out, but I haven't had a luck to test it yet.

4/20/05: An update package, urw-fonts-2.3-0.FC3.1 has solved this problem. You can use up2date, yum or apt-get to download and upgrade to the latest package.

Sound problem with kernel 2.6.10

Audio has worked fine out of box for a long time, but with kernel update released in Janurary 2005, it seems to stop working. The module is loaded and no error is displayed, but you just don't hear any sound. A bug report is found here. The report is about ALSA driver, but snd-intel8x0, which my T40 is using, has a same problem (see here). I have confirmed that the problem occurs in kernel-2.6.10-1.737_FC3 and kernel-2.6.10-1.741_FC3.

Although this may be just a temporary problem, you can't wait to upgrade to 2.6.10 kernels because they contain security fixes. Fortunately, someone posted a workaround that enables audio here. I did the following and got the audio working again. (you don't have to be the root.)

  • Open a terminal window and run /usr/bin/alsamixer
  • Use a right arrow key to move focus to "Headphone Jack Sense".
  • Press 'M' to mute it.
  • Do the same and mute "Line Jack Sense" too.
  • Press the Esc key to exit alsamixer.

I haven't seen any side effect of these settings. The headphone jack and the line jack still work.

Upgrading from FC2 to FC3 using yum

Since I didn't want to repeat everything I did in FC2, I chose to upgrade instead of clean install. There are several ways of doing it (the most standard way will be to downlad iso images of FC3 and install from them), but I just used yum. I have followed the instruction in this page. In summary, I did the following. 
# wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/3/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/fedora-release-3-8.i386.rpm
# wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/3/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/yum-2.1.11-3.noarch.rpm
# rpm -Uvh --force fedora-release-3-8.i386.rpm yum-2.1.11-3.noarch.rpm
# yum upgrade
Then answer 'y' to when the question is displayed. Yum automatially downloaded necessary packages, installed them and removed old packages. It took several hours for download more than 3,000 packages. I had to press ctrl+C and repeat 'yum upgrade' to resume from a network congestion problem.

If there was no problem, yum successfully upgrades the system to FC3, preserving existing system settings. So next time you boot from the new kernel (it is not set as a default in GRUB menu) you're system should be running FC3. However, I couldn't boot the new kernel first. The reason is I was using tp-scroll for the scrolling function with the center button. tp-scroll requires a FIFO named /dev/imouse, but under the new udev system this file is recognized as a regular file. This seems to make the kernel freeze at boot (at runlevel 5, at least). It turned out the following commands solve the problem.



# rm -f /dev/imouse

# mkfifo /dev/imouse

# cp -p /dev/imouse /etc/udev/devices/

For the same reason, if you are using tpb for on-screen display, you need /dev/nvram to be copied under /etc/udev/devices. (If you are using VMWare, you will need to do the same thing for /dev/vmmon and /dev/vmnet*.)

Except above, upgrade was mostly successful. You may want to run 'yum update' to check if there are more update available. Here are some minor problems/cautions I found after the update.

  • The entry for emacs is missing from the menu.
  • KDE anti-aliasing option was turned off. I re-enabed it at the Control Center.
  • In the clean install of FC3, SELinux should be enabled by default with the targeted policy which protects selected daemons (See here for more information). However, in my system which was upgraded from FC2, SELinux is disabled by default. (You can check this in /etc/selinux/config.) If you want to turn on SELinux, you will have to relabel the file system. (And I don't know what happens if you boot the old FC2 kernel after that.)
  • FC3 comes with OpenSSH 3.9, and in recent version of SSH, trusted X11 forwarding is disabled by default. You may need to use '-Y' to use some X11 applications (such as emacs). (See here for the detail.)
  • An unnecessary package, policy-strict-sources seems to have left in the upgrading process. This prevents apt-get, another package management tool, from working properly after upgrade. I ran the following command to solve this problem.


    • 
# rpm -ev policy-strict-sources-1.11.3-3

  • I heard that the xorg-x11-deprecated-libs package is necessary for running Firefox. In my case this package was automatically installed.

Services

FC3 installs a lot of services and daemons, but very often most of them are not used at all. Running processes you never use is a waste of system resources, and also a potential security risk. So you should change the configuration using '/sbin/chkconfig' or you prefer GUI, you can use the 'system-config-services' command instead.

Unfortunetely I have already changed the configuration a lot, I'm not sure which services are on by default. Below is just a list of services I recently found running and unnecessary.

  • I found that this page states that lm_sensors 2.6.5 or later should not be installed on IBM Thinkpads. I'm not sure it it has actually caused a problem in my own machine, but for safety (and since it says it is useless on ThinkPad anyway), I changed the service configuration as follows.

    
/sbin/chkconfig --level 2345 lm_sensors off

    You may also want to remove the lm_sensors package using 'rpm -e' command.
  • mDNSResponder and nifd seem to be for iTune, which I don't have.

Posted on December 18, 2005 8:10 AM |