Critical Exponent

I upgraded my desktop and laptop to Fedora Core 6. I downloaded the discs using BitTorrent for the first time (I first installed BitTorrent using yumex). The installation went smoothly. Here are some caveats:

• The Anaconda installer’s dependency resolution takes a long time when upgrading, but it really is running. One just has to be patient. Really.
• I think there’s a bug with the synaptic touch pad driver. A bunch of the windowing utilities on the laptop (buttons and menu) do not respond after you make a selection until you move the mouse some more. This is not happening on my desktop, which is why I suspect a bug in the driver and not in Gnome.
• To update the previously installed packages using yumex, you must first go to the yumex Tools menu and select Reset Repository Cache.
• The FC-provided nVidia driver works out of the box—but it does not support the desktop effects. Since the proprietary driver is free, I am installing this manually instead.
• Software suspend (suspend2) works out of the box when you run, as root, /usr/sbin/hibernate…and even when you choose Suspend from the Gnome menu. Nice! It appears to be unnecessary to force the nvidia module to unload when suspending.
• To install the fancy desktop effects, you need to install the compiz package, which adds a Desktop Effects option to your menus. Neither my desktop nor laptop video drivers supports Desktop Effects. Here’s how to configure the nVidia driver for the effects—but this seems to work only for beta versions of compiz, which I have not yet installed.
• I recommend using mjmwired’s reference page to finish updating the installation with useful utilities. In the process, I found I had to resize my root partition. Since system-config-lvm insisted on unmounting the root partition (impossible in a normal boot), I booted from a rescue disk and did vgdisplay and lvscan to display the logical volumes and partitions, and pvextend to resize the logical partition. I then booted the system normally and did resize2fs for online resizing of the file system into the larger partition.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 17th, 2006 at 9:26 pm and is filed under Programming & configuration, Sony VAIO VGN S580. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.