Installing Fedora Core 4 on a ThinkPad R40

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Since I upgraded my system from FC1 to FC4 (if this is the correct term), I suffer from plenty of problems. Sobbing about them in private would not help, but maybe sharing them could. Here is how I configured my system, my successes and my failures. Some of the stuff here is not too strongly connected to ThinkPad, but I hope it helps. Please let me know if you can do better.

Wireless (WiFi)

After installing up-to-date RPMs from ATrpms, my previously-defined wlan0 started working nicely. 

rpm -Uvh ipw2100-1.1.0-32.rhfc4.at.i386.rpm \
  ipw2100-firmware-1.3-5.at.noarch.rpm \ 
  ipw2100-kmdl-2.6.12-1.1398_FC4-1.1.0-32.rhfc4.at.i686.rpm

I failed when I tried to play with Kismet or anything else that needs raw monitoring of the channel.

NTFS

A Windows partition comes with the machine, and in order to access it, you should install a proper kernel module from linux-ntfs 

rpm -Uvh kernel-module-ntfs-2.6.12-1.1398_FC4-2.1.22-0.rr.7.4.i686.rpm

modem

Total failure thusfar. Doubly painful since the Smart Link slmdm-2.7.10.tar.gz driver worked nicely with FC1's 2.4.x kernel.

ACPI

Plain horror. Could it be that FC4 lacks any support for going to sleep nicely (to say nothing about proper hibernation) that FC1 had? I hope I am missing something huge here.

To enable the nice blue Fn keys, add 

echo enable,0xffff > /proc/acpi/ibm/hotkey

to your /etc/rc.local . After this, the system will be kind enough to read your /etc/acpi/events/ directory and act as the files therein tell it. See How_to_configure_acpid for more details. Note that the scripts there are not perfect and needs tweaking that I did not perform (yet?); for example, they do not unload the WiFi module on suspend.

yum

Rather simple. Edit /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-updates.repo (and any other repository you are using) to reflect your favorite mirror and run 

yum check-update

to see which of your RPMs has rotten. Is there a simple way for yum to tell me WHAT have changed in the updated RPMs (such as diffing my current --change-log with the new one)?

up2date

It has nice a icon, and it worked in FC1 when I told it to use yum as its "transport". Total failure in FC4.

S-Video

Total failure.

External Sources

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