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Contents List

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LINUX ON DELL LAPTOP/NOTEBOOK COMPUTER
LATITUDE E6410 (Since 2010)
Also Desktop PC
4 Apr 2018: Now also Stonebook Mini
(Re-badged Clevo W515LU) stone-mini.html HERE
Running Fedora 27 (XFCE version)
with CTWM window manager, now flourishing at http://www.ctwm.org/

Jump to main table of contents.

Added 5 May 2017:
Review of Stonebook Mini 11.6" laptop
running Fedora 25 and Windows 10 Home edition.

4 Apr 2018: Getting Firefox text search box to top of page

Copy this directory chrome, including the file it contains userChrome.css with contents

     /* Move Find Bar above the page*/
     .browserContainer > findbar {
     -moz-box-ordinal-group: 0;
     }

into the directory of your current Firefox installation, i.e. something like this location, with lots of other files and subdirectories, used by firefox.

    ~/.mozilla/firefox/xyzxyzxyz/ (or whatever)

To test it quit and restart firefox.
Then, in some window type CTRL-F.
The search box should be top left in the current tab, instead of bottom left.
See also
https://www.userchrome.org/adding-style-recipes-userchrome-css.html
WHY DIDN'T FIREFOX MAKE THIS A STANDARD OPTION?

5 Apr 2017
Instructions for installing gparted-live on USB stick here.

    cd /tmp
    wget https://github.com/linuxenko/ubuntu-skylake-i915-video-fix/releases/download/v1/20-intel.conf

   Section "Extensions"
           Option "XVideo" "Disable"
   EndSection

   Section "Device"
      Identifier  "Intel Graphics"
      Driver      "intel"
      Option      "AccelMethod" "sna"
      Option      "TearFree" "true"
      Option      "DRI" "true"
   EndSection

    cp 20-intel.conf /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf

    /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf

Section "Device"
   Identifier  "Intel Graphics"
   Driver      "intel"
   Option "AccelMethod" "blt"
EndSection

    LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so

    setenv LD_PRELOAD /usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so

    I mistakenly wrote originally:
    I am pleased to report that since installing the new kernel I have found that
    the pm-hibernate command no longer by-passes the grub menu, complained about in
    older parts of this file. So I no longer need the hibernate-tuxonice package. I
    have not yet tried the tuxonice version of this kernel.

After months of partial success with the Intel graphic card, using Fedora 13,
the machine at last works almost perfectly using Fedora 15, starting with kernel 2.6.38,
as described below.
(Earlier attempts to use Ubuntu and Arch linux did not succeed, for my purposes.)
However, I have not yet tried the fingerprint reader and some of the other devices.
See below for installation process and obstruction from Windows 7!

    swapoff /dev/sda3
        if this fails you may have to go into maintenance mode, at run-level 1:
        'init 1'
        then repeat the above command.

    mkswap /dev/sda3

    swapon /dev/sda3

then continue as normal. e.g. 'init 5' for graphical login, or 'init  3' for text login.

Also make sure that the entry for swap in /etc/fstab does not reference some out of date partition ID.

Configuration of my E6410:

Hardware
    The machine is approximately 13" wide, with
    Display:    WXGA+ Anti-Glare 1440x900 display (14" diagonal)
    Memory:     4GB (2x2048MB) 1066MHz DDR3 Dual Channel
    CPU:        Intel. CoreTM i5-540M (2.53GHz, 3M cache) with Turbo Boost Technology
                (four core)
    Graphics:   Intel: HD Graphics With Express Card
                Often referred to as Intel GMA 500 (or Poulsbo)
                http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_GMA#GMA_500
        (Alternative was nvidia -- preferred by many users, though
         linux users have had some problems on this machine.
         I chose the intel graphic card expecting it to use less battery power.
         The quality is excellent, for my purposes. But did not work properly on
         linux till kernel 2.6.38.1 -- Fedora 15/Alpha)
    Hard Drive:      500GB SATA 7,200rpm hard drive,
    Media Bay:  8X DVD+/-RW Dri
    Wireless:   EMEA Intel Pro Wireless 6200 (802.11a/g/Draft-n 2X2) Mini Card
        (Alternative was Broadcom, or more expensive intel card)
    Ethernet:   Intel Corporation 82577LM Gigabit Network Connection
    Webcam:     Integrated HD webcam with Microphone
    Internal UK/Irish Qwerty Backlit Keyboard
    Alps touch pad with two buttons below, THREE above and trackpoint.
        (Having middle button makes a huge difference on linux for pasting.)
        Scrolling gestures do not yet work on linux versions I have tried.
        Also tapping the trackpoint button is not yet recognised as a
        left click, whereas tapping the touch pad is. (6 Jun 2011))
    Integrated Ricoh SD card reader. (Works fine since 2.6.37 kernel)
    Firewire available, but not used.
    Bluetooth (not used)
    Fingerprint reader included, but not yet tried.

    BIOS revision: Originally A05, A06 (Jan 2011), A11 (Jan 2012) A12 (2013)
        (Fetched and installed from Dell web site.)

    For some background information on Linux and the Intel Graphics
    card see this article (Jan 31 2009) Intel's Poulsbo Driver A Bloody Mess?
    Follow-up comments are here.
    That may be partly out of date. The graphic card worked with vesa driver on
    the Fedora 13 Live CD, though I had some difficulty getting it to
    work after I had a full installation of F13, upgraded to newer
    kernels and libraries. More details below.

Operating system supplied by Dell:
    Windows 7 Professional (32bit) [I mainly use linux: see below.]
    (I was not able to purchase the machine without OS, though they
    offer various versions of MSWindows.)
    (Why I hate using windows.)

Accessories:
    9-cell (90Wh) Lithium Ion high capacity battery with ExpressChargeTM
        + 1 spare 9-cell battery.
        For information on battery life see below.

    NOTE:
        Inserting a battery is very easy. Removing it requires three hands
        ideally: one on each side to hold the sliding catch and one to
        pull out the battery.

    90 watt A/C adapter
        + 2 spare A/C adapters (with 2m power cables)

What Linux found on board (June 2010):
    The '/var/log/messages/' file includes this information about CPU
    and graphics where 'lape' is the hostname:
    
        Jun  6 14:00:33 lape kernel: Brought up 4 CPUs
        Jun  6 14:00:33 lape kernel: Total of 4 processors activated (20215.47 BogoMIPS).

    (i.e. the Intel i5 is a 4-core CPU, with the power of 4 x 2.5Ghz cpus.)

        Jun  6 14:00:33 lape kernel: Linux agpgart interface v0.103
        Jun  6 14:00:33 lape kernel: agpgart-intel 0000:00:00.0: Intel HD Graphics Chipset
        Jun  6 14:00:33 lape kernel: agpgart-intel 0000:00:00.0: detected 32764K stolen memory
        Jun  6 14:00:33 lape kernel: agpgart-intel 0000:00:00.0: AGP aperture is 256M @ 0xe00000
    
    The output of lspci is here.

Would not boot with root mounted readable until I altered grub.conf boot instruction to include "selinux=0"
At first hibernate script would not complete resume, but after various updates seems OK.
(A fix for hibernate working without resume is described above.)
pm-hibernate also works, but annoyingly does not let you see the boot menu on resume.
Occasionally hibernate does not work first time, but does work if the command is repeated. Sometimes it seems to be necessary to kill some unused windows before it works.

Temporary summary -- to be revised.
I started using Fedora 15 (F15, FC15) Alpha release, soon after I noticed that it was available, on 15th March 2011.
I now (20th March) have a very usable version of Fedora. Updates are above.

At last there's a version of Fedora that works properly with the new intel graphic card on Dell Latitude E6410.
(I use 32-bit Fedora -- I don't know about 64-bit Fedora).
Apart from sorely missing tuxonice and its hibernate script I seem to be back to my previous Fedora 13 functionality with missing bits fixed: SD card reader now works, and lxrandr gives full control of resolution and external monitor. Even the built-in microphone now works for the first time.

And within a few days of the Alpha release the F15 repositories had a wide variety of updates and application packages -- e.g. vlc, gmplayer, amarok, and others.

The configuration of my machine is given. above.

The Fedora 15 web site http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-prerelease offers several different "Live media"
"spins" as downloadable CD iso images, in addition to the full distributions on DVDs.

I chose the F15 Lxde Fedora live CD to download, because I wanted the system to boot
as quickly as possible. The kernel provided was 2.6.38 (almost immediately updated to
2.6.38.1, which fixed several problems).

To start an installation while the live CD is running, click on the 'install' icon,
and follow instructions -- familiar from previous Fedora releases.

Although I managed to get the version I wanted installed using the Fedora+lxde live
CD I don't recommend it for anyone wishing to try out Fedora15. It may be best to try
the gnome or kde live CDs. I have seen a glowing test report on the live gnome CD.

However I don't like either Gnome or KDE for everyday use, for reasons explained
here, though I dislike Microsoft Windows even more, as explained  here!

Using the LXDE 'live' CD to install Fedora 15 on the Dell E6410

The lxde 'spin' proved not to be usable as a live CD (at least not on my machine). In
particular, terminal responses in lxterminal windows were terrible, with random
echoing of what I typed! I never found out why.

However, after installing F15 from that CD, with a cable network connection providing
30Mb/s I used 'yum update' to bootstrap to a much better version, including a new
kernel and some new drivers, which worked very well:

    2.6.38-1.fc15.i686 #1 SMP Tue Mar 15 05:26:56 UTC 2011

Since then, I have found updates appearing frequently in the Fedora 15 repos. I
started on 15th March and a few days later the system was very usable, with a large
and growing collection of packages in the official and unofficial fedora repos.

Update: 22 Mar 2011 As explained below, although a tuxonice kernel is not yet
packaged for this system, the tuxonice hibernate script can be downloaded and works
perfectly, so far: a much better 'front end' than the terribly restrictive
pm-hibernate.

From initial install of Fedora 15 + lxde to working system

After the initial installation to hard drive, providing kernel 2.6.38, I found problems with the intel graphics, and had to use 'nomodeset' at boot to log in and then run 'yum update' in an xterminal window (as root) to get a new version of the kernel. That installed:

    2.6.38-1.fc15.i686 #1 SMP Tue Mar 15 05:26:56 UTC 2011

along with a lot of driver updates. That made a huge difference and the system was usable.

(I had a problem at first after the update, because using the "nomodeset" boot option earlier had put a temporary file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf invoking the 'vesa' graphic driver, and I had forgotten to remove it before testing the new kernel. I managed to remove it using the Arch Linux CD as a rescue CD.)

I also produced an unusable system later by mistakenly including the fedora Rawhide repo when using the package manager 'Yumex' to add things to the system. That caused some early release Fedora 16 packages to be installed, and they screwed up other F15 things. So I went back to an earlier stage, and used only the standard Fedora repositories and the Atrpms and Rpm-fusion repositories.

Together they have enabled me to build a well configured system including multimedia tools (e.g. gmplayer, amarok, vlc, skype all working).

After the first update, fixing the kernel and various drivers, I could boot up in full graphic mode, and the system has steadily got better and more complete since then.

Instead of OpenOffice there is now Libreoffice, with similar functionality, except that it seems to start up much faster.

The default version of Firefox on Fedora 15 is now V4.0. Google-chrome is also available via the google repo. Firefox is now much improved (not so bulky and slow) and it may reverse my move towards google-chrome, which lacks important functionality that firefox has.

    In fact, because FF 4 is so good, and because the default firefox for fedora 13,
    still running on my desktop PC is version 3.6.15, I fetched the tar file for
    firefox 4 installed it (no compiling needed) and now it runs on the desktop
    too.

As usual, after trying NetworkManager I found it too irritating and unpredictable shut it down, and installed wicd instead. Wifi and ethernet connections now work fine.

My t-mobile "pay as you go" mobile broadband USB dongle (with Huawei technology) works as before as before using wvdial. There may also be a graphical interface tool for it, but I have shell commands that suffice.

Fedora 15: /etc/inittab is now defunct

On linux, I normally alter the default run-level to 3 in /etc/inittab -- non-graphical multi-user mode, with text-only login. I can then run 'startx' to go into graphical mode, controlled by my ~/.xinitrc file and ~/.config/openbox files for the windowmanager.
However things have changed and the 'inittab' file recommends altering the default.target link in the system directory in /lib/systemd/. But that did not work for me: I still got the graphical login.
However adding the parameter '3' at the end of the grub boot command works, and has the advantage that it can be modified at boot time if needed.

Unexplained warning: 'dell_wmi'

Lots of things produce 'dell_wmi: Received unknown WMI event (0x11)' messages, even though the action works -- e.g. using Fn+arrow to change brightness. This appears to be a problem reported many times going several years back. It seems to do no harm, and I presume the cause will be removed.

Current installed packages

My current list of f16 packages installed on the laptop is available in alphabetical order here (probably out of date by the time you read it).

My previous list of f15 installed packages (1,899 packages on 27th Dec 2011) is available in alphabetical order here. (I am no longer using F15 on this machine.)
(I am sure that a significant proportion of those packages will never be used by me: they come with the system, or as parts of bundles I install.)

I also installed some additional items that work well, including the Poplog AI research and teaching package.. (I use its programmable editor Ved for all my work.)

I am pleased that the linux world has at last caught up with all the hardware on the Dell Latitude E6410 -- at least as far as my needs are concerned.
Screen works perfectly, and the SD card reader works. Even the built in microphone, and scrolling on the alps touch pad now work.

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Keeping old versions of linux available
When I installed F15, I used a new partition for root, but reused old /boot, /home /usr/local and swap partitions. After the installation, I restored previously saved old boot images to /boot and reinserted some old bits of /boot/grub/grub.conf so that I could still boot previous versions of linux in addition to the new version.
I kept an older mostly working fedora 13, windows 7 (used very rarely), and Arch linux used experimentally.
(Re-using boot and preserving previous installations can be tricky There are probably how-to guides online.)

Sound using Pulseaudio
I had previously found that starting in non-graphical mode and then entering graphical mode did not provide sound by default, and pulseaudio had to be started by an explicit command. In Fedora 15 the command is:

    pulseaudio --start

e.g. in the ~/.xinitrc file, or openbox autostart.sh file.

Allowing logins using SSH (and file copy, etc.)
At first I could not log in to F15 from other machines at home. Eventually I discovered this was because the iptables firewall is set by default to prevent anything connecting via 'ssh' or anything else. Starting sshd should fix that but does not. To fix the firewall I had to run system-config-firewall-tui and choose 'customise' to enable ssh logins. Alternatively, you can edit /etc/sysconfig/iptables, and add this rule, before the first line containing 'REJECT'.

     -A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT

19 Mar 2011 - TEMPORARY PROBLEMS WITH F15 Alpha:
After the above-mentioned upgrades everything was working well, and I could use pm-hibernate to suspend to hard drive and resume later.
However, when I later tried a full reboot, it had acquired very annoying behaviour: close to finishing rebooting it would hang, for about 6 or 7 minutes, then continue and complete the boot process - after which things were normal.
The behaviour was the same for graphical and non-graphical boot. It seemed to hang after the partitions listed in /etc/fstab are mounted.

While booting was stalled there was no sign of hard drive activity, but the wireless lamp came on and flashed, and the Dlink wireless router, indicated that a connection was being made, but not completed -- e.g. I could not log in remotely. I also could not use CTRL+ALT+F2 to switch to a console terminal during the freeze. But several minutes later the boot completed and everything worked normallyl.
After a couple of hours puzzling about this I found that the pause had disappeared -- perhaps a result of running "yum update" to get the latest updates.
I really don't understand what caused it or what removed it. If it was a temporary bug it should not affect others but I mention it in case someone finds that booting hangs. Wait 5 to 10 minutes to see if it then completes. In that case do a full 'yum update', as I did. F15 Alpha worked well for me, until the final F15 became available.

However, now that I have found a way to boot in non-graphical mode, by putting '3' at the end of the boot command line in /boot/grub/grub.conf I have not tried booting directly in graphical mode, so I can't confirm that that works. I don't like booting straight into graphical mode.
[UPDATE 31 Aug 2011: A couple of weeks ago I bought a new PC to replace my old and sometimes unreliable one, and have been using F15 on it, installed from the "XFCE Light" CDROM. Everything works fine, though because it's a very fast machine I have not bothered to disable the graphical boot: it starts with the login chooser, and I run Openbox. I then use hibernate and resume instead of shutdown and reboot.]

Tuxonice not yet available in F15 repositories
I look forward to having tuxonice with its hibernate command provided in pre-built kernels. It is better than the default suspend to disc (using pm-hibernate) in several ways:

• Tuxonice seems to resume faster.
• It provides a nice display showing progress (using plain text graphics). This can be useful as a diagnostic aid if anything goes wrong.
• The hibernate script pays attention to config files that allow the user to set various options (e.g. specifying actions before and after hibernating).

• Very importantly, tuxonice resume from suspend lets you see the boot menu,
  whereas pm-hibernate does not, presumably on the assumption that booting any
  other installed version of linux after a suspend can corrupt files.
  
  But that feature of pm-hibernate also stops me switching conveniently between linux
  and windows (occasionally needed to test something).
  
  The arrogant linux developers rule this out in pm-hibernate because the dangers
  of misuse (accidentally booting a different version of linux from the one
  suspended in the swap area) can be serious. I have done this once or twice and
  with ext3 or ext4 file systems this has proved no more serious than crashing
  because of a power failure.
  "pm-hibernate" should be provided with a documented option to allow the
  boot menu before resume, along with dire warnings about booting the wrong
  system.
  
  Otherwise linux will only be of use for amateurs escaping from Windows.
  
  Using tuxonice, I can now use 'hibernate' to save the state of my linux system,
  including multiple desktops with unfinished work, then boot into windows if I
  need to, then shutdown windows and the result linux restoring everything very
  quickly. This mechanism could also be used to switch between two installed
  versions of linux if they use different swap partitions. However pm-hibernate
  makes this impossible, which is very annoying. I could try to build a tuxonice
  kernel, but prefer to wait until experts have provided one.
  

  21 Mar 2011: Hibernate problem solved
  I fetched the latest hibernate tar.gz file from here: http://tuxonice.net/
  Currently: http://tuxonice.net/files/hibernate-script-2.0.tar.gz

  This proved very simple to install using the script provided. So far it seems to work
  perfectly, and unlike 'pm-hibernate' does not make the boot menu inaccessible on
  resume. So I have a system nearly as good as tuxonice now. I think it is a little
  slower to resume than tuxonice, but will not be able to compare until I have a
  tuxonice kernel to try out.
  

ADDED 21 May 2011:
Using 'preupgrade', installed Fedora 15 on my Desktop PC after trying on laptop

I decided to upgrade my desktop PC (running Fedora 13) to Fedora 15, so as not to
have different versions on the PC and Laptop.

For the first time ever I used the fedora 'preupgrade' package that analysed my
installation and created information about requirements to upgrade. It gave me the
option to skip the upgrade to F14 and go straight to F15. It provides all the information
required to upgrade and alters /boot/grub.conf to give you the option to boot into
the upgrade process when you next reboot. It saves the hassle of downloading a
bootable image, though you need to make sure you have everything backed up.

It mostly worked, but because I had previously been using an encrypted root partition
it failed. It asked me for the password, but seemed to be unable to use it. I have
not understood why: normally Fedora systems simply request the password then decrypt
the partition. In this case it requested the password, but failed. So I decided to
run with root on an unencrypted partition. (Not ideal, since the '/etc' directory
includes some unencrypted potentially sensitive information.)

Since it is not possible to decrypt a partition in 'situ' I rebooted to a working linux,
then created a new partition (the hard drive had plenty of spare space), copied the
contents of the old root partition to the new one (using 'cp -au'), altered grub and
/etc/fstab in the new partition to look for the the new root, and then rebooted.j

It worked after a glitch that stopped some things running, because when I created the
new root partition I had been logged in as a temporary user, and I forgot to make
root the owner of the root partition! (It took some time to track down the cause of
the symptoms.)

For some reason this installation of F15 does not create or update the
/var/log/messages file. I have not been able to understand why. However I can run
'dmesg' from time to time and save the output.

For a while I tried using Gnome and then KDE on this machine running Fedora 15, and
disliked both, as explained here.

---

Summary: Fedora vs Arch

As explained below, I tried using Arch, and was impressed, especially
by its Live CD which boots quickly into console mode, making it an ideal rescue CD.
It also got my screen and internal SD card reader working, and provided a very
convenient and quick update mechanism.

However I found that there does not seem to be as big a community supporting it, so
many of the things I wanted were not available unless I fetched the source from the
Arch user repository and compiled it. That worked for a couple of things I tried, but
was very tedious, and I could not get tuxonice to work that way. In contrast, very
soon after the Alpha release of Fedora 15 (about 5 days) I had a full working system,
except for the tuxonice kernel, which I assume will be available eventually prebuilt
for Fedora users, as in the past.

So my conclusion is that Arch is only for adventurous people who want total control,
or people who want a very lightweight minimal linux system.

ORIGINAL SUMMARY OF REACTIONS TO E6410 (JUNE 2010)

Overall this is the best laptop I have ever used. Even the speakers sound
surprisingly good despite the machine being small and thin (compared with my previous
laptop: Dell D610). Of course bass is lacking. But a classical music channel playing
on Amarok while I am working is quite tolerable most of the time -- and even better
with earphones, of course!

The screen is much brighter in daylight than previous screens. I regret the fact that
the vertical resolution is now only 900,  but I am coping -- though it needs extra
scrolling when reading or writing documents.

Unfortunately linux support for the intel graphic card has been deficient, though I
found a specific Fedora 13 kernel that does almost all I need, as described here,
except for not supporting the integrated SD card reader, and requiring special care
when using an external monitor or projector. Since Fedora 15, both the SD card reader
and external displays work perfectly.

The keyboard feels excellent, and the backlighting is a very useful option. The Alps
touch-pad works well,  including supporting vertical scrolling, since It's superb to
have middle mouse key on a laptop at last -- I use it all the time for inserting
previously selected text, and am very pleased that I no longer have to emulate middle
key by pressing left and right simultaneously -- this previously drove me to use a
USB mouse, which I no longer need.

The intel wireless card is very well supported on linux. I disabled NetworkManager,
and wicd provides excellent wireless service.
(Note: 8 Sep 2012: I have reinstated NM for a trial period on Fedora 17, since Wicd
seems to have stopped working in F17.)

OTHER NEWS

13 Feb 2011: Virginmedia superhub is junk
Using new VirginMedia (Netgear) Superhub with download speed increased to 30mb/s I
found I had frequent time-outs when using SSH. Problem description and solution here.
I shall add more information on use of the Superhub here.

Summary: The Virgin Media Superhub is Junk except for a small subset of users.
It attempts to integrate cable modem and cable/wireless router in one device, but the
design specification for the package was so dreadful that whoever led that project is
clearly incompetent and should be sacked.

The design flaws, fiercely criticised on the User forum, have been recognised and new
firmware allowing the Superhub to be used as a fast cable modem connected to a
separate router is promised in May 2011. I managed to partially convert it and now
use it with my Dlink DIR-615 router (provided by Virgin Media over a year ago).

Before that I discovered that although the superhub wireless mechanism
works for a laptop in the same room or immediately below, its power was
grossly inadequate for our medium sized 2-storey house, and it failed to
connect anywhere outside the central half of the house. In contrast the
Dlink reaches my laptop in all the far corners of the house, and outside
at the back. Several other people on the user forum also reported
grossly inadequate wireless functionality in the Superhub.

Virgin Media are still advertising the Superhub as a wonderful new combined
Cable Model and wireless router. They are lying to the public and should be
exposed.

25 Feb 2011: Excellent Dell Repair Service -- brief report
On Wednesday 23rd I dropped my laptop, bending the base. It was switched on,
running linux. at first the wireless connection stopped and would not restart,
until I rebooted.

Thursday, after many tests to ensure that nothing was wrong except for external
damage, I phoned Dell support, as I had 3-year accidental damage cover. I was asked
for my express service code and routed to an expert, who asked me a lot of questions,
then asked me to take a lot of photographs and send them in. I also mentioned a
previously cracked lid, and a fiddly catch on DVD drive. They confirmed that this
could be repaired on site and scheduled a repair visit.

On Friday morning the Dell technician phoned and said he would come between 11 and
1pm. Just before 12, he arrived, disassembled the laptop, replaced base plate and lid
and DVD drive, reassembled everything, waited for me to do a few tests, and left
shortly after 1pm.

Everything seems to be working perfectly, and I have the impression the speakers
sound better than previously. I am very impressed. No talking to someone ignorant at
a foreign Dell call centre as in the distant past.

I guess it's also a tribute to the E6410 design and manufacture that falling from a
table to a hard floor damaged only the outer case. It was running linux at the time,
so could not have been protected by Dell's anti shock protection mechanism, which as
far as I know works only in Windows.

Update: 23 Mar 2011
A few days ago I found that one of the two screws holding the hard drive in place had
come out. I reported this by email and very quickly had a bag of screws delivered by
courier. More excellent Dell service.

DELL LATITUDE E6410, DELIVERED 4TH JUNE 2010

Pictures and some reviews
Dell Latitude E6410
See the "E6410 owner's forum" on notebookreview.com (mostly windows users, however).

A partial review of the E6410 as a machine to run linux is below.

Intel vs Nvidia Graphics?
I chose the Intel HD Graphics (with Express Card) option, not NVidia. I am happy
with this, as regards performance and power consumption.

At first the linux software support for this card was seriously deficient. For a
while I used a version of fedora 13 with which I could do everything I want as long
as I don't have an external monitor connected when the machine goes in and out of
graphic mode. That version is described below.

But when I tried to use  more recent kernel (up to 2.6.36 on Fedora 14) there were
problems with the display, whether at boot time, or if the screensaver blanks the
display, after which it cannot be restored.

So for a while I stuck with the F13 kernel from June 2010. The only disadvantage of
going back to F13 was that I can't use the built in SD card reader, which requires a
later kernel. So I have to mount such cards in a USB SD cardholder. Also I have to
disconnect any external display before switching in or out of graphic mode. But all
that has been fixed in Fedora 15.

NOTE: I have found that with 32-bit 2.6.37 Arch Linux kernel the Intel
graphics functionality is perfect (though apparently only 2.6.38 works with this
Intel graphics running 64-bit linux). I have not switched to Arch because too many
other things that I have working on Fedora seem to be much more fiddly to set up in
Arch (e.g. tuxonice for hibernate).


People trying to use the E6410+Nvidia graphics with linux may find this web site
useful. Nvidia graphics also seem to be causing problems for Linux+E6410 machines.
(I don't know if the problems have been solved yet. The intel graphics problems have,
since about march 2011 e.g. in Fedora 15).

Added 2 Feb 2011:
Ashton Fagg's web site may help users with the nvidia graphics card: http://www.zaraphrax.net/linuxe6410.htm
(He uses 64 bit Fedora).

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

This website is still messy and repetitive. I'll try to improve it later.

(If you have any additions email me with your suggestions. Thanks. All contributors
will be acknowledged.)

PARTIAL UPDATE - 21 Jan 2011 (Fedora 13 on Dell E6410 SUPERSEDED SINCE F18)
Machine Details summarised above.
Graphics on Fedora was OK only on an older Fedora 13 (fc13) kernel

Using the 1440x900 graphic display with intel HD graphic card was found to be problematic until I installed the Fedora15 Alpha Release in March 2011, using this kernel

    2.6.38-1.fc15.i686 #1 SMP Tue Mar 15 05:26:56 UTC 2011

(installed by "yum update" soon after installation of FC15).

I found no earlier versions of the linux kernel (on Fedora or Arch or Ubuntu) that worked properly with this intel graphic card.

Partial solution, using Fedora 13
For a time, I used a partial solution that works on (32-bit) Fedora 13, but only with the hard to find 2.6.33.5-112_1 kernel -- with tuxonice (software suspend 2).

Just in case someone is unable to upgrade to Fedora 15, I provide details for getting this machine to work on Fedora 13 with this kernel:

    2.6.33.5-112_1.cubbi_tuxonice.fc13.i686

Matthias Hensler, kindly retrieved the packages from his archive at my request. I have made them available for download here until there is a proper long term fix.

In addition you need to have the Xorg 'intel' driver, and make sure that your file /etc/X11/xorg.conf mentions the intel driver for video, not 'vesa' or 'psb'.

This solution is imperfect for three reasons:
(1) I have to make sure that no external display (monitor or projector) is connected when switching in and out of graphic mode -- otherwise it crashes.

(2) Using lxrandr I can select only the default screen resolution 1440x900, instead of the lower resolutions of which the display is capable.

(3) Using fedora 13 I can't use the Ricoh SDHC card reader built into the laptop, so I have to use an external usb adapter for SD cards, which is a nuisance.

I was able to live with those constraints between June 2010 and March 2011, when FC15 Alpha became available, removing the constraints.

Other F13 and F14 pre-built kernels don't work with Intel graphics on E6410
With all other F13 or F14 kernels I could only get the laptop to start up OK with nomodeset and the 'vesa' driver specified in /etc/X11/xorg.conf, which made using an external monitor or projector impossible.

NOTE added 2 Feb 2011 (Arch Linux 2.6.37, 32 bit on Dell E6410); Updated 9 Feb; 13 Feb 2011

Following a suggestion by Jeremy LaCroix (http://www.jlacroix.me) who has almost the same hardware configuration on his E6410 but uses a different wireless card and runs 64-bit linux, I tried Arch linux with the 2.6.37 kernel (32 bit) and things seem to be better, especially with recent software updates.

    %uname -rv
    2.6.37-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Sat Jan 29 19:40:04 UTC 2011

On my machine the display now starts up perfectly with that kernel. It also works after screen blank, and after pm-suspend/resume. (That includes restoring previous WPA wireless connection.)
At first pm-hibernate did not work at all: after hibernate: it re-booted instead of resuming. This was fixed as described here.

    In
        /boot/grub/menu.lst

    add after root=/dev/sda14 in the boot specification:

        resume=/dev/sda3

    In the file /etc/mkinitcpio.conf add "resume" to this line:

        HOOKS="base udev autodetect scsi sata resume filesystems"

    Then run this command as root:

         mkinitcpio -p kernel26

Early problems after hibernate, with the display, and use of mouse or touch-pad after hibernate, have disappeared since an Arch update on (9 Feb 2011).

So it looks as if 2.6.37 is mostly usable running Arch on my 32-bit machine.
However, I now use 2.6.38-1 on Fedora 15.

If I can find a way to get tuxonice and other things I use working with Arch I may switch to using it at some future date. Meanwhile I prefer Fedora as so many things I can easily install on Fedora (or Ubuntu) are much more hassle to find and install on Arch. (E.g. kernel-tuxonice).

NOTE: 5 Feb 2011 -- Testing Xubuntu light with 2.6.38, on Dell Latitude E6410
I fetched the latest 32 bit Xubuntu (Natty alpha 2) "live CD" to try out. It uses a 2.6.38 kernel.
I chose Xubuntu as that was described as the most light-weight version, which is what I always prefer.
The Intel display worked fine, and I could connect an external monitor and run 'xrandr --auto' to get it working. When I added lxrandr I could also get the full range of display resolutions available on the E6410, instead of only the default 1400x900. It also worked with an external 1280x1024 monitor.
Having got that far with the live CD, I created a partition in which to install it, sharing the existing boot partition. For the initial installation I had to use a cable connection as it did not give me the option set up the connection to my wireless router using WPA.
The Xubuntu installer followed my instruction to use the existing /boot partition without reformatting it (I had saved a copy as a precaution). It discovered the existing boot files and managed to edit my menu.lst file to create a new grub.cfg file using syntax I had never seen before, for booting in a variety of environments. It left my previous windows 7 and fedora 13 options, and other experimental options available. That's impressive. Fedora has never offered me that option (Correction: When Fedora 15 finally appeared, it told it to use the pre-existing /boot partition without formatting. I merged the new installation with old ones successfully.)

Also unlike Fedora Xubuntu sensibly makes the boot menu visible on start up by default. Hiding it by default is completely daft when there is more than one boot option (e.g. linux and Windows).
I spent a little while trying XUbuntu using Openbox rather than the other Desktop managers available. Most things worked though I did not find out how to disable network-manager so that I could use wicd.
pm-suspend worked at first with Ubuntu, but after doing it twice I had trouble re-connecting to the wireless network. Presumably that's a temporary problem. I could not run pm-hibernate, as hibernate was not included in the alpha test kernel.
Xubuntu did not install as good a default set of X libraries as Arch linux did (e.g. including libXt, libXext, libX11, and motif/or lesstif).

For a while the debian x-terminal-emulator, which I had not previously encountered, was the only replacement for xterm that handled the xterm region-scrolling mechanisms properly: for example, gnome-terminal, and lxterminal both failed.
(Correction: lxterminal in Arch running 2.6.37 and on Fedora 15 works OK as an Xterm emulator.)

In Xubuntu+2.6.38 The Alps touch pad now has vertical scrolling working!
Not yet in Fedora 15, alas (2 Apr 2011).
Jeremy LaCroix reported favourably on Xubuntu 11.04 in May 2011.

26 Jan 2011: PARTIAL UPDATE OF PREVIOUS UPDATE (above):
kernel 2.6.36 on Fedora 14 with Intel GMA 500 graphics

I thought this graphic card worked on Fedora 14 with the 2.6.36 kernel.

Alas that proved wrong. If a screensaver is allowed to blank the screen, nothing can get it out of the blank state, except a reboot.
Moreover, sometimes resuming after hibernating does not restore the screen properly.
So I have to go back to the Fedora 13 system described below, and perhaps wait for F15 and the 2.6.37 kernel?

Getting Fedora 14 to work:
At one point I tried building a new kernel on FC14 as described here. It partially worked, but is now out of date.

All of this section, concerning Arch, Ubuntu, and Fedora 13 and 14 is now history, since I installed Fedora 15. It overcomes the problems with the screen and seems to be rock-solid (for me).

Use with external 22" monitor

I bought a Dell 22" Monitor (model E2210) for use with the laptop but at first I found that plugging in an external monitor crashed linux, though it worked OK with Windows 7. That was later fixed in Fedora 15.

Because I could not immediately use the 22" Dell monitor, I gave it to my wife, to replace her 17" Samsung 1280x1024 monitor, used for her work, which includes making orienteering maps, using OCAD.
The Dell was much better for her work, so she kept it!

I then bought a cheaper, 22" monitor at Comet: LG FLATRON W2253TQ (£139.00).
That has worked very well since, with 1920x1080 resolution, which allows me to view two PDF A4 documents side by side (or two pages of the same document).

It has DVI and VGA input sockets, much better switches on the panel, and a slightly higher spec (contrast and response time) than the W2243S.
Its performance is excellent and it has so far not gone wrong.
The DVI input is connected to my desktop PC for normal use.
The VGA input can be connected to the laptop when required, and the 'source' button used to switch inputs.
A highly recommended monitor.

For now I mostly use the LG Monitor with my old desktop PC, though I may later move to using mainly the laptop as it is more powerful.

However, while connected to the PC I can log through to the laptop and use it across the network, very conveniently: a great benefit of linux and the X window system.

PARTIAL CONTENTS
More detailed contents list to be added.
Meanwhile scan down looking for bold headings, or use your browser to search through contents.

• Older Entries (2007-2008 up to Fedora 9) now in separate file

• Fedora 13 Live CD works on the Dell Latitude E6410 with Intel Graphics
  

  Because of all the problems running this laptop in graphical mode described I thought I would see whether it works using the Fedora 13 Live CD Fedora-13-i686-Live.iso (about 700MB) which I had downloaded from the Fedora web site on 27th May 2010.

  Result: everything worked perfectly. It went into graphical mode, allowed me to connect to a wireless network (using the NetworkManager applet (though I normally use wicd instead), when I ran firefox and tried to get the BBC News display working, it told me I needed flash. So I followed the instructions, installed the latest flash plugin, restarted firefox and BBC News worked perfectly, even in full screen mode.

  The volume control buttons on the laptop worked, though I am not able to access them in my normal working mode (using CTWM or Openbox instead of gnome).

  ---

  UPDATE 8 Jul 2010: experiences of other users (e.g. Ubuntu on E6410)

  I seem to have been lucky in my choice of Fedora 13. I have found web sites where other users are having problems using the E6410 with linux, e.g. on Ubuntu here.

  However, there is at least one company selling these machines with linux pre-installed (and presumably fully working): Emperor Linux.

  ---

  UPDATE 2 Jul 2010: Problem getting Pulseaudio working in Runlevel 3 -- Solved at last

  At various stages in the creation of this document (starting several years ago when I had a Dell Latitude D610), I have noted problems with pulseaudio. From the time it first appeared up to Fedora 12, after trying to use it and failing, I found advice given on many websites and removed pulseaudio, and anything that depended on it completely, after which sound worked fine (based on ALSA).

  When I installed and tested Fedora 13, initially using the default graphical login process, at runlevel 5, I found, for the first time, that sound worked perfectly, using pulseaudio, whether I tried audio recordings, videos with sound, or sound and video on the web (e.g. BBC iplayer). (I have had problems getting skype to work, unless I run it as root. I don't know why.)

  However I don't like booting into runlevel 5, and as in the past changed /etc/inittab to boot into runlevel 3, after which I use the console login process, and normally run startx to enter graphical mode, with either CTWM or OpenBox as (light weight, but flexible) window manager. I then usually don't log out again for weeks: I simply use hibernate and resume (using the 'tuxonice' suspend to disk mechanism).

  Unfortunately I was not able to get pulseaudio to work in that mode, and had to switch to runlevel 5 (using 'init 5' as superuser) if I wanted to use sound.

  This led me to the conclusion that I should once again have to remove pulseaudio completely. However, comparing things that were running at level 3 and at level 5 as shown by

      ps auxww
  

  I started to experiment. Eventually I found what seems to be the answer -- after noticing that gstreamer seems apparently involved.
  Install these packages

      PackageKit-gstreamer-plugin-0.6.5-1.fc13.i686
      gstreamer-0.10.29-2.fc13.i686
      gstreamer-plugins-bad-free-0.10.19-1.fc13.i686
      gstreamer-plugins-base-0.10.29-1.fc13.i686
      gstreamer-plugins-good-0.10.23-1.fc13.i686
      gstreamer-python-0.10.16-1.fc12.i686
      gstreamer-tools-0.10.29-2.fc13.i686
      phonon-backend-gstreamer-4.4.2-1.fc13.i686
  

  (I am not sure they are all needed, but have not tried experimenting to see which I can remove.)

  And also make sure you have these two utilities:

      /usr/bin/gnome-volume-control
      /usr/bin/gnome-sound-recorder
  

  These are included in the following, I think.

      gnome-media-2.30.0-1.fc13.i686
      gnome-media-apps-2.30.0-1.fc13.i686
  

  Once all those are installed I find that after starting up graphic mode in runlevel 3, I can run

      /usr/bin/gnome-volume-control
  

  As soon as I adjust the output level, my speakers produce a 'plop' and after that audio output works, though I have to experiment with volume levels.

  To ensure that you can record from microphone (after making sure the mic plug is in the mic socket) run both of these

      /usr/bin/gnome-volume-control
      /usr/bin/gnome-sound-recorder
  

  On the volume control panel, select the 'Input' tab, and experiment with the 'Connector' menu options. I found "Analog Microphone/Microphone 1" worked. The input recording level will probably need to be adjusted. If it is too high all the sound recorded will be badly distorted.

  Use the 'sound recorder' to test microphone input. Click the red button to start recording and watch the volume level at the bottom as you talk. Click the square to stop. Click the triangle to play the recording. You have the option to save your recordings as files.

  It is quite likely that people who do not wish to use those two gnome tools (which work without gnome running) will find some other tools that are able to kick-start pulseaudio as gnome-volume-control seems to do. I don't know the role of 'Packagekit' in all this. I may have found a spurious correlation.

  If anyone understands what is happening and writes or has written a tutorial on this, please contact me. I would be happy to insert a link.

  ---

  Problem with FC15 hibernate and wicd (Now fixed 24 Mar 2012) I have never found NetworkManager satisfactory, and use wicd to control network connections instead. It provides more options than NM, and makes them far more easily accessible at any time, and does not have to be accessed through a desktop applet.

  However, a problem emerged after I installed Fedora 15. I found that the attempt to hibernate would sometimes fail, with this report:

      hibernate: [61] Executing WICDSuspend ...
      wicd directory not found, cannot signal Wicd
      hibernate: Aborting suspend due to errors in WICDSuspend (use --force to override).
  

  After hunting around I found that that report came from the wicd script here:

      /usr/share/hibernate/scriptlets.d/wicd
  

  That wicd script searches for another script that is part of the wicd code, and it was searching in the wrong place. The actual script looked for is here:

      /usr/share/wicd/daemon/autoconnect.py
  

  whereas it was searching here:

      /usr/share/wicd/autoconnect.py
  

  So I edited the wicd script by inserting 'daemon' in the directory name here:

      WICDFindScripts() {
              for NAME in /usr/lib/wicd /usr/share/wicd/daemon; do
                      if [ -f "${NAME}/autoconnect.py" ]; then
                              WICD_DIR=${NAME}
                      fi
              done
      }
  

  That seems to work fine, and the hibernate command works.

  The default hibernate is actually quite tolerable when used with 'hibernate' rather than 'pm-hibernate'. I had to use 'yum' to install hibernate (which despite the name of the package works fine without tuxonice):

      yum install hibernate-tuxonice
  

  I assume the tuxonice bug will be fixed eventually. If so, I'll report that here. I suspect the bug is also due to a change in the directory structure since Fedora 15 and kernel 2.6.38, caused by the switch from using init to using systemd.

  ---

  SUMMARY: Using the Dell latitude E6410 with intel graphics on linux (Fedora 13)

  Overall, the E6410 is a very attractive and usable machine, though quite heavy with 9-cell 90Whr battery. (See weight information below.)

  As a linux user, apart from a hopefully temporary driver problem for new intel graphics, with a temporary workaround, I am very pleased with my choice of the E6410 (updated version of the Latitude E6400) -- having considered other Dell models and also Sony, Lenovo (Thinkpad) and Toshiba.
  There may not be a comparable problem for users who choose the NVidia driver.

  All makes seem to have moved over to the wide-screen low height format (e.g. 1440x900) which I dislike. I much prefer the 1440x1050 ratio on the Dell D610. In most other respects the E6410 is much better.

  Warning: [Problem fixed in F15] The new Intel graphic card will work only with very recent versions of linux. I had problems with Fedora 12, so switched to Fedora 13. There were still problems attaching an external monitor, as explained below, and older versions of linux may fail to boot. E.g. the latest Knoppix live DVD, Version 6.2, seemed to be unable to cope with the graphic card: it did not get as far as producing any user prompt. For progress on open source drivers for intel graphics see http://intellinuxgraphics.org/
  There is a FAQ list here http://intellinuxgraphics.org/documentation.html

  Fedora 13: is a mature linux distribution, with a large collection of 'extra' packages available from the Atrpms respository.

  ---

  Benefits and problems: Dell Latitude E6410 on Fedora 13

  • Intel graphic card seems to have adequate performance
    I had been a little concerned about the performance of the Intel Graphics, but need not have worried.

    Running linux (Fedora 13), the performance of the new Intel graphics on Dell Latitude E6410 is much better than performance of the ATI Radeon M300 card on Dell Latitude D610 using the linux ati driver.

    On the D610, the proprietary ATI driver gave problems with software suspend/hibernate, and did not work with xrandr when I last tried it. On windows both graphic cards work well, e.g. with BBC iPlayer full screen mode.

    On the E6410, the combination of intel graphic card and the linux driver mostly gives excellent performance for my needs -- playing no computer games!

    E.g. switching to full screen on BBC iPlayer is no longer jerky, unlike full screen video on my desktop machine also running fedora 13, using an nvidia graphic card (GEforce 6200).

    Except for the number of pixels vertically, the E6410 screen is the best I have had on a laptop, and usable in much brighter light than my old D610.

    However, I badly miss the larger sized 14" display with 1440x1050 pixels: 1440x900 is just too short top to bottom for some of the work and reading I do -- and requires too much scrolling. This can be mitigated by using an external display (like the Dell or LG 22" monitors mentioned above) for extended work, though connecting an external monitor when using current versions of linux (July 2010) requires disconnecting the monitor when switching in or out of graphic mode, as explained below.

  • Using the new Intel graphic card with an external monitor when booting into runlevel 5 (graphical login) could crash the machine when running fedora 13, as described below.

    However this problem has been fixed since Fedora 15 and kernel 2.6.38.

    For a while I used the laptop successfully with this F13 kernel and xorg components:

        2.6.33.5-124_1.cubbi_tuxonice.fc13.i686 #1 SMP Tue Jun 22 14:49:14 CEST 2010
    
        xorg-x11-drv-intel-2.11.0-4.fc13.i686
        xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.8.0-17.fc13.i686
    

  • Sound and pulseaudio
    Sound on the E6410 worked OK: after installing Fedora 13, time pulseaudio just worked for most things (as long as I started up in graphical mode, at runlevel 5), so I did not have to get rid of it as in previous versions of Fedora.

    When I first altered the boot configuration to start in runlevel 3, I found after starting the window manager that pulseaudio no longer worked.
    However, I managed to get sound working on both my laptop and my desktop machine running Fedora 13, and using pulseaudio, at runlevel 3, as described above.

  • Skype sound at first did not not work properly with pulseaudio -- except at runlevel 5
    For a while I was unable to get skype to work on the E6410 at runlevel 3, which is how I normally work.
    Update 8 Sep 2012: Skype works fine on Fedora, though for a while I had trouble getting audio to work at run-level 3 (multi-user non-graphical login). In my ~/.xinitrc file I have

        pulseaudio --start
    

    and audio now generally works well by default.
    I also had problems with the skype fonts being too small, but the qtconfig-qt4 tool allows me to specicify font style and size, to make things readable. It's important to click on 'save' before exiting the tool, however.
    I am now (Sept 2012) using this version of skype: skype-4.0.0.8-fc16.i586, installed using an rpm file downloaded from the skype web site:
    http://www.skype.com/intl/en-gb/get-skype/on-your-computer/linux/downloading.fedora

    NB 2 Jul 2010: Audio problems now solved.
    

  • Volume control
    As a volume control I mostly use 'alsamixergui -c 0' invoked either by command or by a menu option. That works very well.
    The utility should be part of the default installation for Fedora.

    The gnome-volume-control utility is also useful. It allows both input volume and output volume to work, and seems to be able to start up pulseaudio, as described above.

    The volume up/down keyboard buttons also work in Fedora 13, if I use runlevel 5 (graphical login), but not otherwise. There's probably some service I need to start at runlevel 3.

  • Audio output works on both the built in speakers and the earphone outlet.
    

    The default maximum volume level is a little low, but running 'gnome-volume-control' allows me to go above the default 100%. (My hearing is subnormal).
    However, as soon as I use alsamixergui to adjust the volume the maximum level reverts to its previous (lowish) level.

    The sound is surprisingly good, considering the size of the speakers and the box they are in, with a reasonable stereo spread.
    However, it takes only a few sconds of a Beethoven symphony to make the need for much better speakers obvious.

  • Audio input - voice recording
    'gnome-sound-recorder' allows me to record and play back speech using an external microphone.
    The sound of the recording is noisy if the input volume is set high, but that may partly be due to use of a poor microphone. (To be investigated further).

    For recording audio, 'gnome-sound-recorder' works fine, though I had to experiment with level settings using alsamixergui to get reasonable quality voice recording.

    When I first installed linux on this machine I could not get the built-in microphone to work. but it has been working fine since Fedora 15.

  • Main problem: use of external monitor or projector with linux
    NB FIXED in Fedora 15 (kernel 2.6.38)
    
    I have this package installed, for the intel graphic card:

        xorg-x11-drv-intel-2.11.0-5.fc13.i686
    

    At first the machine was unusable with an external monitor with linux.
    Eventually fixed in Fedora 15

  • For a while I used a work-around to get graphics to work:
    (No longer needed since Fedora 15)
    boot into runlevel 3 and start X (the full graphical interface), using the 'xstart' command
    before plugging monitor in, then use lxrandr.

    This can be broken down into steps as follows:

    1. Download the lxrandr package. E.g. in fedora do:

        yum install lxrandr
    

    For Ubuntu use 'apt-get' instead of 'yum'.

    2. Alter /etc/inittab to make the machine boot into runlevel 3.
    Change

        id:5:initdefault:
    

    to

        id:3:initdefault:
    

    3. Then reboot, or as superuser, do this to switch to runlevel 3:

        init 3
    

    4. Login, in console mode (text only interface)

    5. Use the 'startx' command to enter graphical mode, starting up X.

    The contents of your file: ~/.xinitrc can determine what starts up in graphical mode and which window manager you use.
    (I have tried both OpenBox and CTWM -- my favourite.)

    6. Plug in your external monitor cable or projector cable -- ONLY when running in graphical mode, AFTER using 'startx'.

    Plugging in earlier causes my machine to freeze, requiring a reboot.
    The xorg intel driver, which takes over when X starts up seems to manage fine, but so far only in runlevel 3 (or possibly when running the lxde or lxfe window manager).

    7. Start an xterm or console window, and type:

        lxrandr
    

    (Or add it to one of your mouse-activated menus.)

    If an external monitor is already plugged in, the 'lxrandr' command brings up a panel with two buttons, one for choosing the resolution of your laptop display and one for choosing the resolution of the external monitor/projector. You can also enable or disable either display.

    If no monitor is connected, lxrandr lets you change the resolution of your laptop display.

    With my 1440x900 display on Dell E6410, lxrandr allows me to have the laptop at its own resolution and an external wide-screen LG monitor at 1920x1080, or an older monitor at 1280x1024.

    So not everything that's visible on one screen is visible on the other. With the 1280x1024 monitor each display has visible portions not seen in the other.

    The mouse cursor is visible on both, though it can be moved out of the visible area on one and remain visible on the other.

    The result is quite impressive, but for the fact that the monitor must not be plugged in too early, and must be unplugged before the machine is shut down.

    I had previously been trying to use xrandr commands to connect to an external monitor, but did not understand the documentation well enough, and 'xrandr --auto' did not always give me an optimal result, though on my older Dell D610 it always enabled me to use the available projector.

    An alternative to using 'lxrandr' is to use 'gnome-display-properties', but that does not seem to work in as many contexts. Perhaps it requires runlevel 5?

  • Warnings about use of external monitor with new Intel Graphics [Fixed in Fedora 15]
    NB
    Prior to F15, the external monitor must be connected only when the X window system is already running, and in my experience only using runlevel 3, not runlevel 5 (graphical login) otherwise linux crashes as soon as the monitor is plugged in.

    An exception to this rule occurred when I chose the lxde window manager instead of gnome or openbox during graphical login.

    In that case I could plug in an external monitor after logging in, and use lxrandr to configure it. But I am not accustomed to lxde as window manager, and was not comfortable with its defaults. (I may explore it later).
    See http://lxde.org/

    ---

    UPDATE: 15 Jun 2010: Knoppix Live v6.2 does not work on my machine
    I have found that the latest Knoppix live DVD doesn't work -- the boot process does not complete, presumably because of the new intel graphic card. It produces a blank screen.
    Perhaps it needs new drivers to cope with the Intel 1440x900 graphic card on the E6410?

    There may be other distributions that will not work because they need newer drivers.

  • Problem with full-screen Flash, and a solution
    The intel-graphic card works well, when it works!

    When full-screen flash works it is very good -- videos are fast and smooth: much better than using linux on my Dell D610 with ATI Radeon graphic card, e.g. using BBC iPlayer; though not quite as smooth as my analogue 22" Sony TV set!

    However I found occasionally that switching to full screen flash produces a blank screen. It turns out that this is a known problem with a solution: The cure is

    • If you have the blank screen, use ESC to leave flash full-screen mode.
    • right-click on the flash panel,
    • select 'settings' and disable 'hardware acceleration'.
    • The tip was found here.

  • Webcam
    I was amazed to find that the installed webcam just works on Linux. E.g. using 'cheese' I was able to take pictures of various resolutions up to 2048x1536, like the one in this directory (to which I may add more later, perhaps using lower resolution). 'xawtv' also works.

    However, if I use those programs without running gnome I have to run them as root, e.g. using sudo. There are obviously effects of the graphical login process that I do not understand -- some good and some bad, the worst being the effect of plugging in external monitor mentioned above.

  • Touchpad: has middle mouse button -- excellent!
    I often use middle button for 'paste' and on most laptops with only two buttons, I have to use both buttons simultaneously to emulate middle button click.
    This is tiresome and error prone.

    The E6410 has three buttons above the touchpad and two buttons below. I now use the middle button above the pad very often (for pasting text) -- and don't need to use an external mouse so often.

    There is also a trackpad/trackstick button between keys on the keyboard, which can be used to move the mouse cursor, as described here.
    I don't like it and never use it. (It was also present on my older Dell D610, and never used.) Apparently some people really like it.

    Linux driver for touchpad works, and supports 'tap to select', as well as horizontal and vertical scrolling.

    I don't use windows much, but when I do I found the touchpad much too sensitive and frequently activate items when I intend merely to move the mouse cursor.
    For some reason I don't have that problem on linux.

  • Several users have complained about the touchpad used on recent Dells, claiming that Alps models are inferior to Synaptics models. As far as I am concerned having a middle mouse button available makes this by far the best touchpad I have encountered on a laptop computer.

  • Selinux Problems
    On both the laptop and my desktop PC running F13 I was getting lots of error messages and warning messages from selinux relating to wicd and other things. So I just disabled it in /etc/selinux/config, using

        SELINUX=disabled
    

    I now think this should be the default, leaving it to experts who need Selinux to turn it on. It is disabled on linux machines in our department using CentOS, presumably because it causes more problems than it cures.
    NOTE added 4 Apr 2011: I had to add "selinux=0" to the boot command in grub.conf otherwise when booting it would not mount the root directory.

  • Software/firmware updates installed :

    • While running Windows 7, I went to the Dell support web site fr the E6410 and fetched and installed a number of updates, including two bios updates.

      I am not sure whether I got any benefits from the changes.

    • I also installed a slightly newer version of the F13 kernel, which at first seemed to work OK, but after hibernating once or twice, I had trouble with hibernate. Attempting to hibernate (using 'pm-hibernate') caused my machine to freeze, so I switched to using tuxonice (available here) instead of the standard F13 kernel:

          2.6.33.5-112_1.cubbi_tuxonice.fc13.i686 #1 SMP Tue Jun 1 01:48:41 CEST 2010
      
      more recently switched to:
          2.6.33.5-124_1.cubbi_tuxonice.fc13.i686 #1 SMP Tue Jun 22 14:49:14 CEST 2010
      

      Update: 2 Jul 2010 I am now using tuxonice on both machines.
      

      A major reason for using tuxonice (with the 'hibernate' command) is that the hibernate/resume mechanism provided in the default fedora kernel is slower, does not display progress when suspending or resuming, and also seems to be less robust. The fedora people really should make tuxonice the default.

      UPDATE: 10 Jul 2010
      I have found, especially on the older, slower desktop PC, that sometimes hibernation does not complete, apparently because of lack of space.

      Symptom: The hibernation process starts up and then fails, apparently because of a problem of space. The /var/log/hibernate.log file includes this report. Sometimes if I give the command again after a few seconds it works. On other occasions, if I kill firefox hibernate works. Even when it works hibernate had been taking a much longer time than it used to before I increased the amount of memory (and the swap space).

      Cure: The problem seems to have been removed by altering the file

          /etc/hibernate/tuxonice.conf
      

      to include this line

          ImageSizeLimit nocache
      

      as recommended in http://www.tuxonice.net/FAQ-5.html

      I had not encountered this problem before I (a) doubled the amount of RAM on the PC from 1GB to 2GB, and (b) upgraded from Fedora 10 to Fedora 13, and (c) acquired a new monitor with much higher resolution (1920x1080) than my old one (1280x1024).

      I suspect that doubling the amount of physical memory and providing a large swap area caused linux to create far more disc caches than previously and when hibernate was writing them all to disc this took a very long time. Preventing the caches and buffers being written speeds up the hibernate process considerably, on my machine, and does not seem to add to the time taken to resume. More importantly it seems to solve the problem of hibernation failing because of insufficient space.

      There is not enough user documentation on how to tailor tuxonice. E.g. this web site http://www.tuxonice.net/HOWTO-4.html seems to be written for experts. The 'man hibernate file' includes

         ProcSetting   (requires UseTuxOnIce on)
                   Sets the value of / to  upon hibernating.
                   You can use this setting to set parameters that can't be con-
                   figured anywhere else in this script. This is executed  after
                   all other settings have been set.
      
      

      But gives no information on where to find what parameters are relevant and how to decide what values to give them. Of course, all that should not be necessary: the system should figure things out for itself!

      Swap sizes:
      I have 4GB main memory on the E6410 and 10GB swap area, possibly more than required.
      On the desktop PC the figures were 2GB RAM and 4GB Swap. I have now doubled the swap partition size to 8GB. This may be overkill, but allows for a possible further increase in memory size. On a 1 TB hard drive a few extra GB used for swap is not a great loss.

  • Mobile Broadband Usb Dongle and Three Mifi
    The Tmobile 'web-and-walk' usb stick worked, as did the Three Huawei E586 Mifi device. (7 Mar 2012)
    The Tmobile 'web-and-walk' usb stick worked on the E6410 with my old scripts (developed when using older versions of Fedora on Dell D610), as described on this web page.

    The Three Mifi device is even easier to use, though more expensive. Described on the same web page.

  • Setting the display brightness and keyboard backlighting using the 'Fn' key

    UPDATED: 13 Jul 2010
    There is an ambient light sensor on the E6410 which can control both screen brightness and the keyboard back-lighting.

    It can be mystifying and annoying because the controls are not obvious and the bios setting can be overridden by use of special key combinations.
    Moreover, the linux implementation (at least on F13) seems to be buggy.

    I have provided a summary of the current situation, with some information and
    corrections helpfully provided by Matthew Salzman, in dell-e6410-fn-keys.html HERE,
    Additions and corrections welcome.
    (Other corrections about replacing /proc/ACPI available in the same file.

    The Dell manual for users of the 'Dell Control Point' package is here (PDF).

  • Mouse buttons and keyboard
    I have always liked the feel and most of the layout of Dell latitude keyboards on my previous laptops. This is at least as good.

    However, it's a pity the PageUp/PageDown keys are not adjacent to the UpArrow key, where there are already two unused keys.

    Having a middle mouse button on touchpad is wonderful for many linux users: I use it a lot for pasting text, and the alternative (when a usb mouse is not available), as on most other laptops, is to press left and right buttons simultaneously: annoying and error-prone, or to use an external mouse -- not always convenient.
    On my previous Dell the upper mouse buttons were very sticky and unreliable. On the E6410 both upper and lower buttons feel ok and work ok.

    The back-lit keyboard is very useful for working in dim light.
    The letter names are cut through the key caps allowing the light to be seen through gaps that show which key each one is.

    The audio volume up/down buttons work on F13, when running gnome (runlevel 5).
    I have never had them working on linux previously. I must find a way to get them working at runlevel 3.

  • Unreadable keyboard labels
    The 'alternative' (blue) labels on Function keys are too small and too faint to be read, except in bright light, peering close, preferably with a magnifying glass: why use dark blue paint on a very dark background?

  • No Manuals
    The laptop came with no manual, especially no instructions on how to reinstall the OS: I had to guess not only what the blue labels are for: I also had to guess what to do with the Dell driver CD. It turns out that are online manuals here, including instructions on the sequence to follow when (re-)installing the operating system.
    (Thanks to information from John Cordiner at Dell Support.)

    There was no user manual for the installed operating system, but you can download a Windows 7 user manual here. (PDF version is about 62 MB.) From a quick search through the manual it seems Windows 7 has not addressed the problems that make me dislike using Windows, summarised here.

  • Annoying flashing lights on Dell Latitude E6410
    The constantly flashing bright blue lights at top left of keyboard (wireless, battery, hard drive), are a painful distraction when working in a dim light.

    I would not mind if I could reduce their intensity. Likewise the intense power-button blue light, though at least that doesn't flash. I shall try find something to cover the lights while working -- perhaps a flap that I can lift when I want to know whether there is wireless activity or hard drive activity. It's a pity the battery warning light isn't separate instead of being in the middle: that should not be covered.

  • Battery Life (Updated: 2 Feb 2011)
    The new (low power consumption) technology used on this machine allows the battery to last for much longer on a single charge than a comparable capacity battery would on older machines, though battery life depends, of course, on what you do, including whether wireless is on and whether the screen is bright or dim, whether hard drive is used a lot etc.

    A few weeks after I acquired the E6410 I noticed that one of my two 9-cell batteries seemed to have a higher capacity than the other. Further investigation and experimentation convinced me that one of the batteries (made by Simplo) was much inferior to the other (made by Samsung), in part because after dropping down from full charge a few percent the Simplo could not be recharged until it had dropped even further, to about 95% of full charge. This meant that before a long journey I could not ensure that that battery was fully charged simply by inserting the charger and waiting for the 'flashing' indicator to stop: if a few percent below full charge, it misleadingly did not flash at all, giving the false impression of being fully charged. Also, in that state, the bios battery display clearly indicated that the batter was not not fully charged, and was not charging. I first had to artificially discharge the battery to the level when it would again start charging: surely doing this often would shorten its life? The Samsung/Dell battery did not have this problem. Moreover, even when fully charged the Simplo had a lower capacity than the Samsung.

    So I contacted Dell service, via their web site (filling in a form, which required me to have my order number). The response I got was friendly and helpful, but led to a long confusing saga, summarised here.

    NOTE 1: There are some web sites claiming that many owners of laptop computers have their batteries damaged by running Windows 7. Some of them say it's only the 64 bit Win 7 (which I don't have) that damages batteries. Microsoft deny all the claims. See this microsoft forum page.
    I hardly ever use Windows 7, since all my work is done on Linux, but this is still a worrying possibility.

    NOTE 2: The latest Dell latitudes allow two rates of charging for the battery. You can select between them in the bios. The default is fast/express charge. Some months after acquiring this machine I read on a web site that batteries last longer if the fast charge mode is not used. Dell do not provide any information about this, unfortunately. Anyhow I re-set the bios option to normal charge rate.

  • Not really light-weight
    I found that when travelling with the Latitude D610, with several hours a day out of reach of a power supply (e.g. on a long distance flight) I had to take one or more spare batteries in addition to using a battery to replace the DVD drive in the media bay on the D610. I think I shall have less weight to carry around, but not much less now. Using grotty inaccurate kitchen scale:

        D610 with two batteries     (5lb  8oz, 2.56Kg)
        D610 with only main battery (4lb 13oz, 2.2Kg)
            secondary battery       (12oz,     0.36Kg)
    
        E6410 with 9cell battery    (4lb 14oz,  2.21 Kg)
        E6410 with no battery       (3lb 14oz,  1.76 Kg)
        9 Cell battery:             (1lb  0oz,  0.45 Kg)
    
        [Please treat the numbers as very approximate.]
    

    [To be extended]

  • Wireless connections
    The intel wireless adapter works fine. I previously used my own scripts to start and stop it in various contexts though wicd works so well I have switched to using that. As usual when I tried using NetworkManager, it just got in the way, so I removed it from the machine. My wireless router was recently upgraded from 802.11g to 11n and the broadband cable download speed increased from 20 to 30mb/s. The intel wireless card works perfectly and I get almost the same speed as with the ethernet connection to the router..

    Information about how I connect to the Birmingham University wifi service, using wpa encryption is here.
    It explains, among other things, that I have to use 'dhclient -r' before trying to make a dhcp wireless connection. That is not a feature of this laptop.

    Although wireless works, at first I had problems because the the label for the wireless device on Fedora has switched from 'eth1' to 'wlan0' causing problems for me, though probably not for most other linux users.

    That's because I use home-grown scripts for setting up network connections in slightly different ways (e.g. different 'known hosts') in different contexts (e.g. home, office, visiting colleagues, at airports, hotels, etc.), and those scripts stopped working, and my scripts referred to 'eth1' not 'wlan0'.

    NetworkManager could not cope and seemed to get in the way, so I removed it completely from the system. Installing 'wicd' gave me a working system. It should be part of the default Fedora distribution.

    It took some time to sort out the changes needed to my scripts. Some involved checking all the files, including all the interface specifications for different sites, and making sure that I not only replaced 'eth1' with 'wlan0' throughout but also replaced old mac addresses with new ones, for both ethernet and wireless.

    This demonstrated that my system (described here) is not sufficiently modular and will need to switch to using dynamically generated scripts using an easily changeable set of parameters, when I have time. The scripts now work at home and for connection to UoBWifi on campus, so I don't need wicd, except for ad-hoc temporary connections at hotels, airports, etc.

    I also had to add a new command to 'wake up' the wireless card, which can be switched off externally on Dell's latest Latitude series. When switched back on again, the current linux network software apparently does not notice automatically. While sorting out the scripts, I was able to use wicd to connect to a wireless service, until I had sorted out my scripts. The version that now works with Fedora 13 on the E6410 for connecting to my wpa-based wireless access point at home is here.

  • Problem turning Wireless on and off -- fixed
    For a while I thought that on the E6410 the only way to turn wireless power off (very important for conserving battery power) is using the new (very convenient) switch on the edge of the case.

    I found that switching wireless back on enabled windows 7 wireless connections to work, but not on linux, until I found these commands

        iwconfig eth0 txpower on
        iwconfig eth0 txpower off
    

    The first command restores power to the wireless card. I had to do that for wicd as well as for my own scripts.

  • Fan noise
    I mostly don't hear sounds from the fan (though the CD/DVD drive is fairly noisy).
    The machine stays much cooler than the D610.

  • Power supplies/Chargers (Updated 24 Jun 2010)
    I ordered two extra chargers (90w AC Adapters). Of the three, two arrived with the little 'blobble' broken off the button used to hold the strap in place when wound round the cable. I asked Dell for replacement buttons. They should be easy to install.

    However, Dell support said they would send me complete new chargers, not just the buttons, as compensation for inconvenience. They were very helpful, including checking that the new items had arrived (in particular Andrea Kromholcova, of Dell UK Customer Care).

    Confusing web site information about Dell AC power supply/Charger
    The online information about these chargers is somewhat confusing. It turns out there are two models. Both have cables about 2m long between the power supply and the laptop, but one version has a 1m cable to power socket and the other has a 2m cable. I previously found the 1+2m length available on the D610 charger too short, e.g. in badly designed seminar rooms. The extra metre will be very useful.

    Despite having a higher power rating the new power brick is thinner and also apparently lighter than the old 60 Watt one.

  ---

  Background

  Before I bought this model of laptop I was considering using Fedora 12 or 13 on the new machine.

  I had already been using F12 on my older laptop (Dell D610), as described below, but thought the new laptop might need a newer version of linux because it includes some new hardware.

  In order to gain experience of F13 on familiar hardware, I therefore tried upgrading my 5 year old desktop PC (using AMD Athlon64), which was running Fedora 10, to F13, for practice. It was generally successful. For more details on that installation, which raised some problems which I had to solve, see below.

  ---

  Installation of Linux (Fedora 12/13) on E6410: Obstruction from Windows 7
  See above for: Using linux (Fedora 13) on Dell Latitude E6410: and partial review of the laptop/notebook

  • Obstructive Windows 7...

    My first problem was that Dell had installed Windows 7 in such a way that it used up the whole drive and proved impossible to shrink leaving space for fedora -- including stupidly giving users only ONE usable windows partition, which I would think even Windows users would not wish on such a large drive.

    In my frustration I accidentally deleted the Windows7 partition, so used Dell's 'recovery' CDs to reinstall it, That seemed to work, although one of the partitions that Dell had installed, a small one after the main Windows partition, did not re-appear. So Win7 now requires only two partitions instead of three, one of the two apparently being a small (100 MB) boot partition (?). Windows 7 works fine as far as I can tell (I gave it 60 GB, and have kept a spare 40 GB ntfs partition unused in case I ever want more for windows (e.g. saved BBC iPlayer stuff?). I am not really a windows user, and I leave windows on my laptop because I have paid for it, I can spare the space I have given it, and it is sometimes useful for checking that hardware is not at fault. Dell service engineers may require it.
    

    My accidental deletion occurred while using the Fedora 13 Live cd. The partition editor provided is not nearly as convenient as gparted. The latter should be standard for Fedora.

    Dell's installation of Windows 7 on the 500GB hard drive is stupid and obstructive, (a) because they installed windows in one huge partition, which nobody is likely to want and (b) they made it impossible to shrink that partition and create new partitions.

  • Fedora 13 Pass 1 -- not quite right
    My first installation of F13, carefully restricted to a subset of the remaining space on the drive, seemed to go very well. But when I later tried getting my networking scripts to work I met problems because I have been using 'eth1' for wireless and for some reason Fedora now have switched to 'wlan0', and simply editing my scripts did not work. I also failed to reinstate 'eth1' for wireless use.

    I did manage later to sort out wireless for F13, as described above.

    Since Fedora 12 (F12) had been working fine on my older laptop (Dell Latitude D610) I thought I would try that, using a new partition for root.

  • Trying F12 instead
    Unfortunately I found that F12 has also switched from 'eth1' to 'wlan0', and I could not get wireless networking to operate consistently, even though it works perfectly on my D610 using F12. I also could not get sound to work and was faced with the prospect of going through a tortuous process of removing all trace of pulseaudio (as on the D610) and getting alternative sound mechanisms to work, so instead of wasting more hours I decided to go back to F13.

    I had noticed three other problems while using F12 which were presumably due to new hardware -- drivers not yet ready:

    1. Attempting to attach an external monitor crashed Fedora, while
        running gnome.
    
    2. The use of touch-pad (Alps) for scrolling did not work, even
       though it had worked perfectly on F12 with the other laptop.
    
    3. Attaching a USB mouse worked fine,  but not a USB keyboard: no
       characters were received, and worse, it made the internal keyboard
       stop working also: reboot required.
    
    

    So, back to Fedora 13, which cured point 3. As explained above I found that booting into run-level 3 cured point 1. I am hoping later releases will cure point 2.

  • F13 Pass 2, working after all (mostly)

    I reinstalled F13, using a new partition for root, in case I had to go back to F12, but using the same 'home' partition (which I had not encrypted, to allow it to be easily shared across versions of linux).

    I tried gnome and kde for a while but disliked both intensely, in different ways, so went back to using Openbox, which loses some of the applets, but otherwise suits me (though not as well as CTWM did before its functionality proved limited -- it did not handle the full screen option in flash),

  • RTNETLINK Ethernet Problem in Fedora 13

    UPDATED: 3 Jul 2010
    Since the original installation, I have not been using the Dell Laptop with cable, using only the wireless connection. The hibernate/resume process works fine, using a tuxonice kernel on the laptop and a wireless connection, using WPA. (I don't use NetworkManager, and I have shell scripts for starting the wireless connection in different locations, as described here.)

    However, on my desktop PC running F13, using a cable connection instead of wireless, and also running a tuxonice kernel, for a while I had problems with the ethernet connection after hibernate/resume.

    The problem of not being able to reconnect has gone away now, using this kernel

        2.6.33.5-124_1.cubbi_tuxonice.fc13.i686
    

    and giving the 'hibernate' command while at runlevel 3:

    However, I now find that after resuming from hibernation, the machine displays this message in the xterm window in which I give the 'hibernate' command:

        % sudo hibernate
        Shutting down loopback interface:                          [  OK  ]
        Shutting down loopback interface:                          [  OK  ]
        Bringing up loopback interface:                            [  OK  ]
        Bringing up loopback interface:                            [  OK  ]
        RTNETLINK answers: File exists
        RTNETLINK answers: File exists
        RTNETLINK answers: File exists
        RTNETLINK answers: File exists
        RTNETLINK answers: File exists
        RTNETLINK answers: File exists
        RTNETLINK answers: File exists
        RTNETLINK answers: File exists
        RTNETLINK answers: File exists
    

    However everything seems to work, provided I do it all at runlevel 3. If I do the graphical login at runlevel 5, and try to hibernate it sometimes fails to complete the hibernation process, but without any explanation -- it just returns to the previous running state.

    Despite the above message everything now works after resuming at runlevel 3, including automatic re-opening of the network connection.

    Earlier problem now gone:
    At an earlier stage, when testing F13 on my desktop machine, with its ethernet connection, I found it difficult to get the ethernet connection to restart after hibernate/resume. This message used to appear.

        Bringing up interface eth0:  RTNETLINK answers: Cannot allocate memory
    

    At that stage I could connect by rebooting the machine. Searching the internet, I found reports of several other users reporting this error message, but no definitive diagnosis or cure. If you have ideas about this, please email me (a.sloman @ cs.bham.ac.uk). I shall post the answers, with acknowledgements.

    NOTE 28 Jun 2010: The problems went away while using a standard kernel and the 'pm-hibernate' command:
    with kernel: 2.6.33.5-124.fc13.i686 #1 SMP Fri Jun 11 09:48:40 UTC 2010
    I later returned to using a tuxonice kernel, as I much prefer the interface while hibernating and resuming, and it is also faster.

  ---

  30 May 2010: Installing F13 on Desktop PC:
  Preparing for Fedora 13 on Dell Latitude 6410

  I ordered the Dell 6410 to replace my aging and under-configured D610. Because of new graphics and other features I thought I should try Fedora 13, instead of F12, which I am using on the current laptop, though I would not normally install something so new. To check out the process I decided to upgrade my desktop machine from F10 to F13 instead of F12. I encountered some problems, and solutions, described below, though basically the installation was successful. I then installed Linux on the E6410 laptop when it arrived. The process had ups and downs, but was over all successful eventually apart from two driver problems, one serious. To see a report on the laptop installation look here. The rest of this section reports on experience with F13 on the desktop PC.
  

  Trying Fedora 13 on a desktop PC
  I wanted to try this out on an older working machine first, so that I could easily revert to a previous working version if I had problems. In particular, I have never tried encrypting hard drives, which I know I should do on a machine that I take to meetings and conferences. So I decided to install F13 in an unused portion of a large 1TB Western Digital drive, using 4 new partitions: one for swap (and software suspend), one for /boot, one for root(/) and one for /home, knowing that I could go back to the working version of F10 using an older drive, if necessary.

  ---

  Useful sites

  • The F13 installation guide has a lot of useful information:
    http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/13/html/Installation_Guide/index.html
    including information about the encryption process.

  • http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-f13.html

        * Installation Media
        * Physical Installation
        * Network Management
        * Setup sudo
        * Setup yum
        * Install MP3 Players
        * Install Media Players
        * Install TrueType Fonts
        * Modify Services/Daemons
        * Adobe Flash Plugin
        * Java Runtime Environment
        * Install Adobe Acrobat
        * Setup Samba
        * More Information and Translations
    

    This and the next web site tell you what to do to extend information about repositories in /etc/yum.repos.d/
    Following that advice made it very easy to use yum and the corresponding graphical tool yumex to fetch or uninstall packages, with all dependencies automatically looked after. This seems to remove one of the previously important advantages of Ubuntu over Fedora.

    (My main complaint about yumex is that there doesn't seem to be any documentation on what the peculiar symbols used to indicate status of packages mean: you have to guess. In general it needs tutorial documentation, which I could not find.
    Another problem is that there seems to be no way to mark something as 'I never want this', so that it is not included in future in update lists or available lists.
    Despite the annoyances I manage to use it for many things, especially uninstalling unwanted packages. I expect it would be much more frustrating to use if I did not have 20Mb cable broadband.)

  • http://www.hackourlives.com/perfect-desktop-using-fedora-13-goddard-post-install-guide/
    Information on what to do to install lots of useful extras after the main installation (including things not included in 'official' Fedora repositories) basic F13 installation.

  ---

  General first impressions of Fedora 13 on Desktop machine
  It was in some ways the easiest Linux install I have ever done (although they still make the process of choosing packages to install very tedious: there should be away of asking for all packages containing e.g. 'font' and selecting a subset, or all packages concerning latex, etc.

  Apart from that tedium everything worked at first (including pulseaudio for the first time ever for me, though I later had problems when I switched to booting into runlevel 3. The problems are now solved, as described above.

  But I had some problems with networking, because I had previously been using my own scripts and they no longer worked. However eventually I sorted out the problems. Nevertheless I had a usable system. The hibernate-restore mechanism in the standard linux distribution as usual gave problems, so once again I installed the 'tuxonice' kernels: tuxonice is much more robust, faster, and has a nice display showing what is going on during hibernation and resume. WHY isn't that the default for linux???

  ---

  A problem caused by encrypting partitions
  At one point during the process of configuring F13, I had corrupted my /etc/fstab which was on the root partition which was encrypted. The error prevented booting, and the encryption potentially made it difficult to get at the partition using a 'live cd', but fortunately the 'fedora13 live' cd enabled me to mount the encrypted root partition, and fix the problem with /etc/fstab.

  After I had installed two versions of Fedora on the same machine, using encrypted file partitions I found that while running F13 I could not access files on an encrypted partition installed with F12, and vice versa. Later I found how to put appropriate entries in /etc/fstab and /etc/crypttab, which I shall document later.

  I think that on the new laptop I should restrict the use of encryption to one partition and ensure that anything private is on that. Apart from the potential inconvenience of dealing with unnecessarily encrypted files if something goes wrong, reading and writing to encrypted files uses more cpu power, and could reduce battery time.

  In spite of the extra load, Fedora 13 boots faster than any previous version of Linux I have used, and even gnome starts fairly quickly, though I switched to openbox which is faster, smaller and more configurable.

  ---

  Dictatorial Gnome Developers
  I searched for ages to find how to tell gnome that (for several reasons that have to do with working efficiently, not just personal taste) I want 'focus follows mouse', not 'click to focus', and failed.

  Google told me that lots of other people were complaining about this. It turns out that the Gnome developers, apparently with the approval of Fedora people, decided not to include that even as an option in the default configuration: you have to find, fetch and load an extra package to convert your windows preferences menu to allow that. That sort of dictatorship by designers convinces me that I should never use Gnome for serious work. Anyhow, I did find two ways to fix this, one using the gconf-editor instead of the standard preferences menu:

      Run 'gconf-editor'.
      Select Edit, then Find. Type in "metacity" (WITHOUT clicking on
      either of the 2 tickboxes underneath).
      Select 'general', then right click on 'focus mode', and
      select 'edit'. You can choose "click" (the dictatorial default)
      "mouse" for focus follows mouse, or "sloppy" which means windows
      are focused when the mouse enters the window, so you won't lose
      focus by moving mouse to root window.
  

  The other option required an obscure extra package to be loaded to modify the gnome preferences menu. Both worked, but the decision to make the option so hard to find shows a terribly dictatorial and inconsiderate mind-set in the Gnome developers.

  I have not had time to find out if KDE is any better, and in any case I want something smaller, simpler, cleaner, than either, e.g. openbox (which I am currently using or ctwm which I like even better but is no longer consistent with recent X window standards (e.g. supporting full screen flash). I much prefer a system like openbox or ctwm that allows me to set all my preferences in a text file, that can easily be copied from one machine to another (or reinstalled after an upgrad) instead of going through tedious and error prone procedures selecting menu options.

  ---

  Java problems with browsers
  The default installation of F13 gave me the JDK version of Java, which suffices for many purposes, but since I need Sun Java some of the time I fetched and installed the latest jre. Unfortunately that stopped firefox, seamonkey and opera working. They crashed with complaints like

      INTERNAL ERROR on Browser End: Could not get the plugin manager
      System error?:: Success
  

  Google soon showed me that many people have had this problem and there are many suggestions on mutual help files about what to do, most of which appear not to work. One that should have but did not is use of '/usr/sbin/alternatives' in something like this format:

      /usr/sbin/alternatives --install /usr/bin/java java /usr/share/...java... 20000
  

  I could not get that to do the job.

  Eventually I worked out that the problem was installing sun's java while the jdk system was installed, and as a result browsers were looking in the wrong places to find plugins. I have a directory (which I can retain across changes of linux versions):

      /usr/local/mozilla.plugins
  

  in which I include links to plugins, including, for example,

  • nphelix.so, for realplay, provided in RealPlayer11GOLD.bin
  • libflashplayer.so, obtained from Adobe
  • libjavaplugin_oji.so, the old java plugin, available here on my machine:

        /usr/local/src/java/jre1.6.0_20/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so
    

  • libnpjp2.so, the newer plugin required for recent versions of Firefox, available here on my machine

        /usr/local/src/java/jre1.6.0_20/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so
    

  The problem was where to put links to those plugins. Simply using

      ~/.mozilla/plugins
  

  did not seem to work with current versions of web browsers, and did not get rid of the 'plugin manager error'. However I found various places where there seemed to be plugins, and inserted links to the links in my mozilla.plugins directory. I should have kept a list of all of them, but these are examples:

      /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/
      /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins-wrapped/
  

  I am not sure the second one is needed. I also found some other directories containing browser plugins, which I suspect were spurious relics. I'll later collect a list and include them here, after doing experiments to see which ones are not needed.

  I also found that after installing 'jre' from Sun, I had to do some editing of files in /etc/java, and /etc/alternatives/. I all links to jdk and java items in the jdk directories, and removed them.

  Now, firefox, opera, and seamonkey all work ok with java and flash.

  ---

  Pulseaudio works, at last
  For the last few versions of Fedora, up to Fedora 12, I had to remove all trace of pulseaudio after installation in order to get sound working. However, after installing F13, sound worked after I ran alsamixer, pressed F6, which showed me the option of selecting the Nvida sound card, which I chose. Since then I have not had a problem with sound -- until I changed /etc/inittab to boot into runlevel 3, instead of runlevel 5, as I prefer running in the simpler environment. At first pulseaudio then would not work, but I eventually solved the problem as described above.

  ---

  X.org Nvidia graphic driver works
  So far I have found no reason to go to the nvidia site to get their proprietary driver. The nvida graphics card was detected automatically during installation and seems to work very well, including running glxgears in the default configuration. However, switching the BBC iPlayer to full screen produces slightly jerky, slightly blurred results. I don't know if that's due to the age of the card or the use of the linux driver instead of Nvidia's. I don't play computer games and don't often watch full screen videos.

  Previously the nvidia driver proved incompatible with software suspend (hibernate). I may try it with this new version of Fedora when I have time.

  Both 'vlc' and 'smplayer' work ok, in addition to flash and java on web sites.

  The glxgears program runs reasonably quickly and smoothly, printing out

      983 frames in 5.0 seconds = 196.594 FPS
      940 frames in 5.0 seconds = 187.966 FPS
      971 frames in 5.0 seconds = 194.111 FPS
  

  ---

  Xterm and font problems
  I use a programmable text editor (Ved) for all my work (even composing html like this, with edit commands inserting the more complex html tags). It has the great benefit of being just as easy to use on a remote machine accessed via ssh as on the local machine, provided the access is in an xterm window, or equivalent. The editor requires the window in which it is running to emulate full 'xterm' functionality (originally derived from the 'vt100' dumb terminal), e.g. inserting or deleting lines or changing highlighting on receipt of special control signals (preceded by ESC).

  Unfortunately not all the terminals provided in linux nowadays have the full set of character control facilities provided by 'xterm', even if they have other fancy extras, like menus for setting preferences, etc. In particular 'gnome-terminal' can't handle all the screen control commands, though it comes close.

  The KDE terminal invoked as 'konsole' is much better than gnome-terminal, insofar as it handles all the screen control signals properly, so that all the scrolling works as expected. However it is also much worse because the function keys do not work with the VT100 or xterm functionality and apparently cannot be made to transmit anything but their inadequate defaults. This does however, mean that for users who are willing to do everything with the main keyboard, plus ESC and CTRL, the 'konsole' program is acceptable.

  Anyhow xterm does what I need, but for many years I have used it with fonts specified as '10x20', '8x13bold', but the default set of fonts supplied by F13 did not include those. I've also found in the past that that 'legacy' fonts required by 'tgif' are not present.
  This seemed to be connected with the fact that starting up 'xterm' caused this to be printed out, though it had no other effect:

      Warning: Cannot convert string "nil2" to type FontStruct
  

  There are many other people reporting this problem on the internet, all apparently bemused by it. Something I did later, involving installation of additional fonts required by some package, caused that warning to disappear. I remain mystified.

  I did some exploring and found that the following fonts were quite suitable for use with 'xterm', providing a range of font sizes:

       -b&h-*-medium-r-*-sans-8-*-*-*-m-*-*-*
       -b&h-*-medium-r-*-sans-10-*-*-*-m-*-*-*
       -b&h-*-medium-r-*-sans-12-*-*-*-m-*-*-*
       -b&h-*-medium-r-*-sans-14-*-*-*-m-*-*-*
       -b&h-*-medium-r-*-sans-17-*-*-*-m-*-*-*
       -b&h-*-medium-r-*-sans-18-*-*-*-m-*-*-*
       -b&h-*-medium-r-*-sans-20-*-*-*-m-*-*-*
       -b&h-*-medium-r-*-sans-26-*-*-*-m-*-*-*
       -b&h-*-medium-r-*-sans-34-*-*-*-m-*-*-*
  

  I used a subset of those in my .Xdefaults to specify fonts for the 'xterm' font menu.

  I shall also have to change the default fonts used in Poplog, selected many years ago, to include only fonts likely to be used by most people, at least for English.

  FONTS UPDATE 1 Jun 2010:
  Something I installed, and I did not notice at the time which package it was, also installed a required set of fonts. It turns out that these include the fonts that Pop-11 and Ved have been using. However it is useful to know the above can work as an alternative. For several days, instead of using '10x20' as my default font, I have been using

      -b&h-*-medium-r-*-sans-18-*-*-*-m-*-*-*
  

  This is quite tolerable, and gets a few more lines per inch onto the screen, which can be useful, though it is slightly cramped.

  ---

  Window managers: Gnome, Openbox, Ctwm
  See above, and my Openbox web page

  ---

  Facilities for managing HP Deskjet D2360 were not available by default
  It took quite a bit of messing around with yumex and system-config-printer before my printer would work after the upgrade. The HP printer libraries were not included in the initial selections I made when installing Fedora, and searching for them using 'yumex' did not at first get me all the required packages (e.g. hplip), which had not been a problem with previous versions of Fedora. But a bit more probing turned them up, and 'hp-levels' draws the cartridge ink levels using characters in an xterm window, like this (colours not included here):

      Black cartridge
      Part No.: 21
      Health: Good/OK
      ------------------------------------------------------------------------
      |///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////   | (approx. 94%)
      ------------------------------------------------------------------------
  
      Tri-color cartridge
      Part No.: 22
      Health: Good/OK
      ------------------------------------------------------------------------
      |////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////      | (approx. 90%)
      ------------------------------------------------------------------------
  

  (The original cartridges for this printer were terribly expensive, but now the XL versions are much better value for money, and the printer has worked much better than my previous Lexmark and Epson printers, both of which stopped working after two or three years.)

  ---

  The tedium of installing
  It can be very time-consuming to get a new installation of Fedora to replicate all the previous functionality. I believe the 'preupgrade' facility automates the process of attempting to replicate the existing installation in a new installation of Fedora. This presumably does not help much if you wish to replicate it on a different machine. It would be useful if one option for preupgrade were to be production of a file or directory specifying everything that needs to be in the new version of Fedora. Then in principle, when the installer asks you to go through its terribly tedious menus trying to remember what you need, it should instead either allow you to plug in a USB memory stick with all the information in a standard form, or else allow the user to specify the location in a file system that is not being used for the new installation, or allow a URL to be given that points to the specification on a web site.

  ---

  ADDED 1 Jun 2010: Hibernate and resume
  I found that selecting hibernate from the gnome system menu (an option not provided in the OpenBox menus that I have found), worked fine. But not the pm-hibernate command: the hibernation failed and I had to power down and restart. However, this seems to be overcome by defining an alias (which I have defined as 'hib') for

      sudo pm-hibernate --auto-quirks
  

  It seems to shut down and resume faster than when I was using Fedora 10 with tuxonice (which I have so far not tried with F13, and may not need to if the default system works ok). It may be faster only because root and swap are now on my new WD 1 terabyte drive, instead of the older seagate.

  UPDATE: 1 Jun 2010
  Alas, after a while I discovered that pm-hibernate works only once or twice, after which it failed, and the machine had to be rebooted.

  So I installed Tuxonice for F13. At first I could not get that to work, because the swap area was no longer accessible. Something had happened to its encryption, apparently. 'top' showed no swap space. I tried going back to the ordinary kernel (i.e. not Tuxonice) and when that ran it also had no swap area.

  So I decided that encrypting the swap area had been a mistake and ran

      mkswap /dev/sdc2
  

  followed by

      swapon -a
  

  then rebooted. At that stage 'top' showed that the swap area was being used. Since I had altered the entry for swap in /etc/fstab to reflect the new format I tried hibernate/resume (with tuxonice). That's what I now use after some ups and downs. (3 Jul 2010). I much prefer having the graphical display provided by tuxonice, showing the progress of suspend and resume, instead of having to sit and watch a blank screen wondering what is happening.

  ---

  ADDED 1 Jun 2010: Selinux errors
  I get lots of panels mentioning selinux errors that I don't understand. Some the options to submit reports don't work because I don't have an account at the receiving site. Some of the reports give me an 'authenticate' option, which I have selected, though the list of errors does not indicate that this has been done. I have the impression that for a desktop machine behind a firewall at home, selinux gives more trouble than benefits.
  So I disabled selinux as many others have done. Alter /etc/selinux/config, to include

      SELINUX=disabled
  

  ---

  NEWS 26 Mar 2010:
  Introduction of new service UOBwifi with new certificate (March 2010)
  NB The previous service UOBWLAN will be phased out in the summer of 2010,
  when the existing security certificates will all expire.

  ---

  THE REST OF THIS FILE IS CONCERNED WITH OLDER VERSIONS OF FEDORA (PRE 13)
  USED ON A DELL LATITUDE D610 (2005 -- 2010).
  INCLUDING MY SWITCH FROM USING THE CTWM WINDOW MANAGER TO USING OPENBOX

  26 Mar 2010: Switched to running Fedora 12 on D610 (Mostly OK)

  Later I'll report on problems getting CapsLock and Ctrl Swapped: the old method stopped working.

  Also had trouble with pulseaudio (like very many linux users using various distributions of Linux). I was forced to use yumex to uninstall everything that mentioned pulseaudio, which caused a host of other things to be uninstalled. I then reinstalled what I needed, and everything works except gnome-volume-control, which can't get a connection. But alsamixer works as does alsamixer-gui so I can do without gnome-volume-control. The best sounds (e.g. using BBC iPlayer) are surprisingly good in view of the small size of the speakers and the volume enclosing them. However, I think the D610 had a fuller sound, though perhaps the treble is slightly better on the E6410. My main problem is that the general volume level too low on the E6410, and I can't a way to increase it (on linux).

  The

  Why don't linux developers either FIX pulseaudio or make it an optional extra for experts who want it, instead of screwing up everyone else and giving linux a bad name? Giving google "pulseaudio problems" to search for produces 111,000 results.

  ---

  31 Jan 2010 Getting Java to work on Firefox 3.6, on Fedora 10

  The firefox web site telling you to upgrade fails to warn you that linux users will need a different java plugin for Firefox 3.6. Fortunately, if you have a recent java installed you probably already have the plugin. Use this command to find out where it is:

      locate libnpjp2.so
  

  E.g. I found it in

      /usr/java/jre1.6.0_16/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so
  

  Then insert a link to that in your firefox plugins directory, e.g.

      ln -s /usr/java/jre1.6.0_16/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so .../firefox3.6/plugins
  

  Then restart firefox. See also http://support.mozilla.com/nl/forum/1/554389

  Another problem I had was that firefox 3.6

      tools --> add-ons --> plugins
  

  kept reporting the flash plugin as being version 9, even though I have version 10. I had to remove the pluginreg.dat file in the ~/.mozilla/firefox/default.../ directory

  ---

  Switched from using CTWM to using Openbox as window manager (Jan 2009)
  Details here.

  Added some screenshots 16 Feb 2009.

  Sept 2009: Switched back to ctwm after a patch was announced on the ctwm mailing list.
  It now works with full screen flash.

  ---

  24 Oct 2009 Using Mobile Broadband Pay as you go USB stick in Germany and France works!
  But you have to ask them to set up the service.

      It worked using both windows and linux, even on high speed train between
      Paris and Saarbruecken (usable but variable quality).
  
      Reasonably cheap for reading and sending email remotely via text-only interface.
      (I log in via SSH and use Pine and a text editor):
      Cost is 1.50 GBP per Mbyte transferred.
  
      This web page gives further information about how I use the T-mobile web'n'walk
      mobile broadband USB stick on a machine running Fedora 10.
  
      It probably works with many different configurations of linux, though
      I understand some Ubuntu users have found that recent (late 2009)
      versions of the NetworkManager interface to mobile broadband is broken.
  
      WARNING:
      The t-mobile service has an under-18 lock which is turned on by default
      to prevent access to 'social networks'. This even blocks google mail and
      signing in to a google account, though not yahoo mail, which is
      stupid and arbitrary (especially when they have the information that
      I am over 70). The web site says you can remove the block interactively,
      but that works only for phone users not mobile broadband users. I have
      complained. Others should too!
      After they removed the block I could access google mail when running the
      t-mobile software on windows, but not when using linux. I don't know why.
      It just hangs, with no explanation. T-mobile need to fix their service.
  

  ---

  Partial history of this web site

  Linux on my Laptop:
  I had long been a unix/solaris `juser (starting using unix around 1976 at Sussex University). Later, I began using various versions of RedHat Linux, starting with version 6, on a Dell Latitude (with 400mhz celeron) in 1999 and ending with RedHat version 9 in 2003,

  This website was started when I obtained the Dell Latitude D600 in 2003. I started with RedHat 9 then switched to Fedora Core 3, then replaced the D600 with a D610 in October 2005, then later switched to Fedora Core 5, then Fedora 7 in July 2007, followed by Fedora 8 in 2008, and Fedora 10 in January 2009

  Linux on my Desktop:
  Departmental
  In our department (School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham) we started switching from using Suns to using PCs running linux (except for our central servers, which remained Suns for several years) around 2000. When we moved to a new building in 2001 I was given a Pentium 4 PC running some version of Redhat, which was later replaced by Whitebox, then CentOS, and my machine was upgraded in 2007.

  Home
  In 2001 I finally started using a 1Ghz AMD Athlon PC running linux (RedHat) on my desktop at home, instead of a 10 year old Sun workstation. Later (around 2006) that was replaced by a 2Ghz AMD Athlon 64. I moved through various versions of linux (32 bit versions, since I had no need for 64 bit addresses), starting with Redhat 7 I think, then Redhat 9, then various versions of Fedora.

  For the sake of continuity I don't upgrade my laptop and desktop at the same time e.g. I had fedora 4 and 6 and now 9 on my desktop and fedora 3, 5, 7 and 8 on my laptop. I tried Ubuntu temporarily on a spare machine, but found that it had no advantages (for me) over Fedora -- especially after a version of the 'synaptic' package manager became available for RedHat/Fedora.

  Note added 1 Aug 2008:
  I've learnt that 'yumex' on Fedora provides what appears to be similar functionality to 'synaptic'. It may even be better -- I have not yet looked closely enough to decide.
  Note added 6 Jun 2009: I have been using yumex for several months and it is excellent, even though it displays icons that it does not explain!

  ---

  CONTENTS FOR USERS RUNNING FEDORA (5, 7, 8, 9, 10) (and possibly others)
  (Latest first.)

  • 14 May 2010: OLD UPDATES MOVED TO SEPARATE FILE

  • Connection to Campus Wireless Network using WPA_SUPPLICANT on Linux
    (In separate file.) (Added note on using wicd with F10, on 2 Jun 2009).

  • History: University and Home, Laptop and Desktop, all using Linux.

  • UPDATE 18 Jun 2009: Using Mobile Broadband USB stick
    This web page gives information about how to use the T-mobile web'n'walk mobile broadband USB stick on a machine running Fedora 10. It probably works with many different configurations of linux. (See later update above.)

  • UPDATE 22 Feb 2009: Fedora 10 on my desktop
    I installed F10 on my desktop PC early in January, including 'tuxonice' (Software Suspend 2), and everything seemed to work very well, as long as I avoided the Nvidia driver (which interfered with suspend/resume and used only 'nv'.
    However after a while I kept finding the graphical interface freezing, with Xorg taking up 99.8% of cpu time, and mouse and keyboard not working, though I could log in from my laptop. For a while I reverted to the 2.6.27.5-117 kernel (with tuxonice), and that seemed to work. However, a few days ago a new kernel became available, and since switching to that, the problem has gone away: 2.6.27.15-170.2.24_1.cubbi_tuxonice.fc10.i686

    After one of the kernel changes pulseaudio stopped working, which seems to be a problem for many linux users. So I followed the advice of one of them and simply used 'yum remove...' to remove pulseaudio from my machine. After that audio worked as expected! I had to do the same on my laptop running F8. (I believe problems with pulseaudio are not restricted to Fedora. The people working on it seem to be trying to do something useful, but failing to accommodate all the different combinations of hardware and software. So probably it should never be installed by default on a linux system until all the problems have been fixed.)

    Note, Fedora no longer uses /etc/sysconfig/harddisks, as explained below.

  • UPDATE 18 Oct 2008: Use of laptop with ATI Radeon X300 card and external display or projector
    Including how to use the 'xrandr' command to interrogate displays, to turn on a display, and to switch between different resolutions.
    (Updated 15 Jun 2009, regarding use of nomodeset at boot time.)

    ---

  • Operating-system Neutral Items (realplayer, wpa, vpn, email)
    • UPDATE 25 Dec 2006: RealPlayer problem solved
    • How to get vpn running
    • WPA_SUPPLICANT works on BHAM campus
    • Using sysctl to overcome problems caused by Fedora/Redhat security defaults
    • Booting up in non-graphic mode and using CTWM for window manager
    • Playing DVDs and music CDs on D610 with FC5 (and others)
    • UPDATE 8 Feb 2007: fighting the university (Microsoft Exchange) email system

    ---

  • ITEMS PRIOR TO INSTALLING FEDORA 7: IN 'OLD' FILE

    ---

  • CONTENTS PRIOR TO INSTALLATION OF FEDORA CORE 5: IN 'OLD' FILE

Operating-system Neutral Items (realplayer, wpa, vpn, email)

UPDATE 25 Dec 2006: RealPlayer problem solved

Previously I wrote:

A mystifying problem remains. On the D610 if I try to run the BBC realplayer based video news player (http://news.bbc.co.uk/) it works fine, until I use xine or mplayer to display a video. After that nothing using realplayer works (apart from sound) until I restart the X window system. I don't have that problem on the D600. If anyone can tell me how to 'refresh' the video capability of realplayer without stopping and restarting X11 I'll be grateful. (At least it's not as bad as having to reboot). Merely switching to a text console (e.g. Fn+ALT+F2) and back does not work.

I discovered by accident how to solve this problem.

• Run realplay.
• Select tools --> preferences
• Select Hardware
• Under 'driver options', if Use Xvideo is selected, deselect it.
• Apply

I made this discover while running RealPlayer 10.0.8.805 (gold) (built July 2006). The problem had occurred both on my desktop PC running Fedora Core 6 and on my Dell D610 running Fedora Core 5. The above steps have fixed the problem on both. It also worked on F7.

---

UPDATE 14 Nov 2006: ADDING VPN

o adding VPN software to access the School of Computer science

---

UPDATE 15 Aug 2006: WPA_SUPPLICANT WORKS ON BHAM CAMPUS

After upgrading my Dell Latitude D610 (whose batteries have not exploded) to use Fedora Core 5, I have now at last overcome the problems of using wpa_supplicant to access the University of Birmingham wireless network.
Details here (separate file).

A simpler solution based on NetworkManager is provided by Martin Escado here (specially useful for Ubuntu users).

Users of Palm pilot wishing to use the campus wireless network should see these notes by Tim Williams.

---

Problems caused by security settings (Selinux) in RedHat and Fedora core (since FC4), and how to get round them using 'sysctl' are described here.

---

Booting up in non-graphic mode and using CTWM for window manager

I don't like booting straight into graphic mode not least because that adds to the load on the machine and slows down booting. So I edited the file

    /etc/inittab

changing the line

    id:5:initdefault:

to make it boot into state 3 (full multi-user mode without graphics) rather than state 5 (multi-user mode with X11):

    id:3:initdefault:

When it boots up I get a 'login' prompt on a text console, and after logging in I can run 'startx' to initiate the X window system. I control its behaviour using a file .xinitrc, which starts a clock, a couple of Xterm windows in different virtual desktops, and then run the small, fast, highly tailorable and extremely robust window manager ctwm (version 3.7). To show how small ctwm is, here is part of the output of 'top', with ctwm running:

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 9758 axs       15   0  6456 2172 1692 S  0.0  0.2   0:00.11 ctwm

I use ctwm with 8 or 10 virtual desktops, and lots of keyboard bindings to reduce use of mouse, including going to next or previous virtual desktop.

Is ctwm the only window manager that supports the 'wrap' default when you cycle through virtual desktops: i.e. when I get to the last desktop, the 'next desktop' function takes me back to desktop 1, and likewise the 'previous desktop' when on desktop 1?

I expected this to work on gnome when I tried it, but the gnome designers do not seem to understand elegance: so, there's no wrapping.

Use of mouse in the root window gives access to menus selected by all three buttons. E.g. a menu item invoking xvidmode enables instant switching of screen resolution instead of having to go through a tool to switch or cycling through resolutions using CTRL+ALT+PLUS/MINUS. I get a new xterm (console) window instantly by pressing key F1 with mouse cursor not in any application. etc. etc. (xvidtune can also be invoked).

The .ctwmrc file makes it possible to do many kinds of tailoring very easily, including specifying that some windows should be visible in all desktops, some should have no title bar, etc. etc. I used to find that ctwm always compiled easily from source. But it uses 'xmkmf' which is no longer included in FC5. So I untarred the ctwm-3.7.tar.gz file on a machine running FC4, followed the instructions up to xmkmf, which created a Makefile. I copied the whole lot to my laptop running FC5, then ran 'make', and 'make install', which gave me my much needed ctwm.

You can normally fetch the latest version of ctwm from

http://ctwm.free.lp.se/dist/

I have made available a version of the tar file that includes the Makefile created using the default settings for Imakefile.local. It can be fetched (about 1.1Mb) here. If you untar it and type 'make' it should produce a usable version of ctwm. Run 'make install' to install it. To make the man file available copy ctwm.man to /usr/local/man/man1.

There are many web sites giving sample versions of .ctwmrc to produce different sorts of 'Look and feel' with ctwm, e.g.

http://www.thought.org/credits/ctwmrc.html
http://ctwm.free.lp.se/themes/mcrc
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~kinzler/home/etc/ctwmrc
http://hobbit.ict.griffith.edu.au/~anthony/icons/appl/twm/CTwm_config_example

Find more by giving ctwmrc to google.

Other window managers for X11 systems are listed here: http://fr.rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/X11_Window_Managers.html

---

UPDATE 30 Aug 2006: Playing DVDs and Music CDs

For some time I was not been able to play DVDs on my Dell D610, whether using FC3 or FC5. It turns out that that's because I had been using the command

    gmplayer /dev/dvd

which used to work on my old laptop. However, I've just looked at the mplayer man file and noticed for the first time that I was giving the wrong command! It should have been

    gmplayer dvd://

So I can play dvds OK -- Not that I need to often, but I had just got a dvd containing a video recording a lecture I wanted to listen to.

Like one of my colleagues I was not able to play music CDs using linux on the D610 or on my desktop machine using FC4, without first copying the files using cdparanoia and then using play, or gmplayer -- until I learnt about alsamixer !

When I ran it on my desktop pc I found far more options than I had previously thought existed and one of them seemed to toggle the CD input. That enabled me to use cdp to play a music CD.

Then I did more investigation and found that gnome-cd would play a cd.

On the Dell D610 I had more difficulty. alsamixer did not seem to do anything to make cds play, but I did some exploring and found kscd.

The kcsd tool has an 'Extras' button. One of the options it provides is 'configure kscd'.

One of the options that provides is "use direct digital playback".

I selected the 'alsa' backend, clicked on 'Apply' and after that CDs worked on my laptop with kscd.

It seems that cdplayers can use either the analog input from the cd device, using a cable that connects the device to the motherboard, or else play directly using the digital source. But apparently our linux systems were not set up to do the latter by default, which seems to be required now on the D610.

I learnt a bit more here http://docs.kde.org/stable/en/kdemultimedia/kscd/ts-ddpback.html

Fortunately kscd works fine with ctwm: I don't need to run kde.

---

UPDATE 8 Feb 2007: fighting the University (Microsoft Exchange) email system

With help from Zeth Green, I've added information on accessing university email from a linux machine.

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/university-email-settings.html

This report is listed at TuxMobil - Linux on laptops, notebooks, PDAs, mobile phones.

Maintained by Aaron Sloman A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk
This web site was first created some time in 2003 soon after I acquired a Dell D600.
Last updated: 22 Feb 2009; 1 Jan 2010; 31 May 2010;1 Jun 2010; 12 Jun 2010; 15 Jun 2010; 20 Jun 2010; 22 Jun 2010; 7 Jul 2010; 20 Jan 2011; Feb 2011; 21 Mar 2011;15 Apr 2011; 23 Apr 2011; 30 Apr 2011; 21 May 2011; 29 May 2011; 18 Sep 2011; 7 Mar 2012; 23 Jul 2012; 2013, 2014; 2015; 30 Sep 2016;