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Fedora 10 co-operating with Windows XP – part4

// December 14th, 2008 // No Comments » // Musings

Awesome! I got suspend and 3D graphics working fine on the Dell E6400!

Searching the Fedora / RPMFusion repositories revealed this:

NVIDIA proprietary display drivers … hrm … my laptop has an NVIDIA GPU Quadro NVS 160M.

Get some more info:

Installing this with yum -y install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia enables 3D acceleration (Desktop Effects now works) and suspend works perfectly now.

I now pronounce the Dell E6400 as sufficiently “Linux Friendly” for use. My only remaining hardware issue seems to be the Bluetooth device, and I haven’t tried the memory card reader (I’m not a photographer).

Fedora 10 co-operating with Windows XP – part3

// December 12th, 2008 // No Comments » // Technology

OK … trying to get MS Office to run within Linux is do-able … just not easy to do for someone who doesn’t have the Office CD’s (i.e. me). I might have to drop by our local Microsoft distributor’s and ask if they can loan me the CD so I can install it on my Linux partition … LOL! My problem right now is that I have an OEM install of Office 12, and I can’t run the Install from the CD, which triggers copying all the relevant DLLs from the CD.

The winetricks shell script failed to run on my laptop … due to my iffy internet connection. I think I’ll just have to resign to keeping Windows for Office work, and Fedora 10 for experimenting with OSS.

Fedora 10 co-operating with Windows XP – part2 (Updated)

// December 10th, 2008 // No Comments » // Technology

If you plan to use Linux on your Dell Latitude E-Series (E6400, E6500, etc), make sure you can live without suspend. 3D graphics support also seems very iffy. [Update: Both 3D graphics and suspend works now, after I installed new drivers from RPMFusion]

On the bright side … there are new drivers for the Broadcom wireless NICs, and work beautifully in Fedora 10, courtesy of rpmfusion.org. And the 64-bit support is very good … I’m using 64-bit Fedora, and I thought I’d have more problems using a 64-bit OS. It’s actually going very well, Linux now has 64-bit support in Flash.

Fedora 10 co-exists nicely with Windows XP. After setting up dual-boot, Windows tried to “check the disk” that Linux is sitting on. Silly operating system … that’s ext4 something you’ll never understand. My problem is now hardware compatability issues. Living without suspend is really really bad. When I used my wife’s 2006 MBP, I never had to switch it off, always using the Suspend-to-RAM feature with never a hitch. Always resumed perfectly.

I think it’s time to seriously evaluate the Mac Book Air … or even a new 15″ MBP. Fedora is a great distribution for power users, but you really have to pair it up with compatible hardware. Maybe one of the things the Brunei’s Open Source Software Community could do is to award “Tested with Linux!” stickers to hardware vendors who ship good Linux gear in Brunei … hrmmm …

Fedora 10 co-operating with Windows XP – part1

// December 10th, 2008 // No Comments » // Technology

Right after my laptop went blue screen of death on me … I received a replacement laptop. Unfortunately the replacement is paired off into a Windows domain that has very restrictive policies. Which means, no installing extra programs, no playing around with OSS. This can be a bummer, especially when I need work requires me to interact with a Linux machine over ssh.

So instead of trying to fit an OSS peg into a Windows hole … I’m just going to try getting Linux working on the machine. This will be a challenge since the wireless card doesn’t have full support. But the nice thing about dual-booting is that I only have to carry around one machine, yet still be able to have access to all the Linux goodness (whoami? i am root) and Windows-specific apps (using Wine) while booted into Fed0ra 10.

I’ll be updating this blog with my success (or failure!) stories on getting Fedora 10 to play nice with Windows on the same machine. In case you are wondering to yourself … why bother? Let me leave you with this:

Windows flaked out on me … perma-blue screen of death. Linux to the rescue …

// December 5th, 2008 // No Comments » // Technology

Just when I was stumped by Windows … it throws me the ultimate curveball, Blue Screen of Death.

I was just trying (struggling more like it) to get Windows and my RoR environment to play nice (I’m using the Aptana Studio IDE, two thumbs up!) when the screensaver hangs. Yup you read right … the basic, stock, default screensaver hung the stock Windows XP installation. I had just recently gotten fed up with Internet Explorer (crashed without saving all my tabs … which Firefox doesn’t do) and switched over to Firefox, so maybe this was Windows being vindictive and trying to get even with me.

Upon reboot … BSOD! Something about my usb drivers are acting up and they are causing Windows to fail. WTH? Reboot … BSOD! Your volume is unmountable. WTF? That’s the last straw … I need to rescue my data from that Windows machine. The best solution I can think of is to boot with a Linux Live CD, re-mount the “unmountable” partition and back everything up to my iMac. I have half a mind to then install something more suitable on the machine, so that I can at least continue using it comfortably.

The best part is … I was previously using my wife’s 2006 15inch Core2 Duo MBP, running an older version of Mac OS X (10.4). And it was smooth sailing for me for the past 5 months, never a hardware issue, never a hiccup. And this Windows machine was the office-supplied one, I’ve only been using it for about 2 weeks. Someone asked me what I thought of the new machines, I replied “meets expectations”. They were surprised and said, “Only that?”. Dayum if only this incident happened before they asked, I could have pointed them to this blog post haha.

Windows 0, Mac OS X 1. Good Game to you, sir.