Upgrading the IBM T41 to Fedora Core 5, part two

Putting together a distro so that it can do all the things that you want can be a bit of a challenge. For various reasons, both OpenSUSE and Fedora do not ship with everything installed or configured to be totally usable as a desktop, especially if you are using it as a full MS Windows desktop / laptop replacement as I am. The handy unofficial Fedora Faq is pretty helpful for doing all the work that comes after the basic OS is installed.

There are also some things that have to be worked through not documented there. I keep my home directory in a separate partition from “/” so that I can upgrade the OS, but not have to backup and restore all the stuff in my home directory. Things like all my .iso images and vmware images that are huge, and would be a big pain to have to take off and then restore. Although that means all my old configuration data is still there, and that does not always work well. I blow away all my KDE and Gnome dot files (".kde", etc) before I log in as myself so that they can be re-created by the new versions of the environments. I should not have to of course, but QA'ing an upgrade is way harder than an install, and if there is a problem these days with installing any OS, it can almost always be traced to an upgrade going sideways. Better to just re-enter all the information about my mail server a few times.

So the 60 GB, 7200 rpm HD has 10 GB for the MS Windows XP boot, 9 GB for “/”, 2 GB for swap, and the balance is “/home”. 7200 rpm disk is a nice thing to have: makes VMWare guests much faster.

One of the most annoying parts of a new Linux install even to this day is Java, especially in the browser. OK, I get it. Java, at least from Sun, is not yet OSS. So the pure OSS distros like Fedora, OpenSUSE, Debian, etc will not do anything to help you install it. The Mozilla foundation won't package a plugin to date. But I have to have it, so I have to install it every freakin' time. Worse, it changes all the time. Sun reorganizes their web site for Java as often as I fill my car with fuel (about eveyr two weeks: Ed.). I can never quite figure out what the download-du-jour is on the first try. And all I need is the JRE. But they don't call it that anymore. ARRGGG!.

Once you find the download, and get it put into place, to get it going you have to know the magic incantation, usually some variation of this (breaking it up to three lines for readability. Really all on one line):

sudo ln -s 
/usr/java/jre1.5.0_08/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so 
/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/ 

This is one software package that I can not wait to have truly OSS just so it can be packaged without me having to waste as much as an hour sometimes trying to get all the right bits in the right places and linked the right way.

While I am happy the Evolution 2.6.3 is working, it does have a few annoying habits. Main one so far is that when I start it, it pops open a password prompt, then the main screen, hiding the password prompt. It then sits there looking like it is doing nothing, but what it is really doing it waiting for a password. One of my major gripes about MS Windows is the way things will pop up and grab focus that I wish would just sit there and wait for me to look at them: I like the way the Mac bounces the icon on the task bar when something wants attention rather than getting in my face. It seems like this could be better. If nothing else, delay the password prompt a bit longer so it has a chance to be the visible screen.

One thing not working (and I find this very odd) is Gmail. Not from Opera, Ephiphany, Firefox, Mozilla, or IE running under Codeweavers Crossover. I can bring up a VM like XP or Ubantu or Knoppix and it works from there. I can dual back over to XP (I had not been there in a while... updates galore while I was there.) and it works from there. But not the native client. I have installed three different JVM's on the chance it was a Java thing, but that did not matter. I can run pure Java apps, no problem. Calendar.google.com works. So does spreadsheets. So some javascript is working. I have dumped my cache, logged into to different userids, cleaned the .mozilla file out, googled looking for similar, and read the help over at google.com. I installed current Firefox from mozilla.com, and ran it against a clean .mozilla file.

Nothing has worked yet. I do not get it yet. I am installing the Gnome Desktop to see if it is a KDE thing now. Konqueror works, because gmail thinks it can not deal with javascript and changes to pure HTML mode. Actually, Firefox and all the others work in pure HTML mode too.

I grabbed the new VMWare Player 1.0.2 that just came out, and it installed OK. I had to point it at the right place in Fedora to get the headers (/lib/modules/2.6.17-1.2174_FC5/build/include now, not /usr/src/linux/include) but other than that it worked OK. I have booted Knoppix, MS Windows XP, and Ubuntu under it without issues.

The Atheros a/b/g built in (miniPCI) wifi card was noticed and installed, but 'neat' does not manage it. No biggie: I am used to putting the config stuff in /etc/rc.d/rc.local.

Other than the gmail thing, FC5 has been working like a champ. The T41 seems to boot faster too, and everything feels crisper in response time than before. I am thinking about installing the OpenSUSE 10.2 disk from the NX5000 to see if they feels any different... not to mention to see if gmail works there....