RB554UT#ABA on Evan Hoffman

Clean install of FC14, regain Radeon X1600 support (!)

Sun, 20 Feb 2011 11:48:39 +0000

So I was complaining the other day about losing support for the Radeon X1600 when I upgraded my work laptop from FC12 to FC14. I was on the verge of ordering a new laptop (ThinkPad W510 with quadcore i7 and 1GB Quadro looks niiiice…) when I figured it was worth at least giving a true clean install a shot. I backed up all my stuff to an external USB drive, repartitioned my drive (finally done in a sane way), did a fresh FC14 install, and miraculously everything seemed to work. rsynced all my stuff back over and it was almost perfect. I still have a weird issue when trying to unlock my screen after it goes into screensaver - basically I can’t, it just stays locked and I’ve resorted to doing “init 3” and then “init 5” to make it work again. That’s a minor annoyance though at this point. So, yay again for Fedora! I wouldn’t go with ATi for a Linux machine again though.

Upgrading FC12 to FC14, lose support for Radeon X1600

Tue, 08 Feb 2011 13:23:06 +0000

I’d been running FC12 for quite a while and I noticed the past few weeks have been devoid of yum updates (except for Google Chrome). I figured FC15 is on the horizon; now’s a good time to upgrade to FC14.

I followed the basic procedure laid out here and went 12 -> 13 no problem. 13 -> 14: problem. The upgrade appeared to go well (loooong time to complete, downloading/installing 1+ gigs of packages, even over my 25 mbps home line) but X would not start no matter what. At this point I learned that system-config-display has been deprecated in FC14 and isn’t even there! I tried “Xorg –configure” but that configuration still didn’t work. I then tried doing a yum downgrade to FC13… let me save you the trouble: never try this.

Why is my laptop so freaking hot?

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 14:07:07 +0000

HP Compaq nc8430, Core 2 Duo T7200 2.0GHz. Fedora Core 12 x86_64, kernel 2.6.32.19-163.fc12.x86_64 (just updated via yum).

At idle, with nothing running in the foreground, the CPU is around 70-72° Celsius, and the other sensors are 80°+. Why is this? It seems like every time I run yum update the machine gets hotter. I wonder if there’s any way to figure out what’s causing this. In any case, it’s pretty annoying. It’s uncomfortable putting the thing on my lap for any length of time.