Click the screenshot to view 1280×800 resolution version

After working nonstop for more than 12 hours on F7, I would be spending my night @ Sandy’s place to setup & test my Wifi & maybe reuse an old 1-click script I wrote long back to join my home network (Wifi-Radar should be also good enough)

But a desktop with 1 Gig or RAM & no gDesklets -  umm, it was missing _something_ hehehe So I spent another hour fetching some desklets – was surprised to find that now using gDesklets was as simple as dragging the tarball link into the gDesklets Manager – some gnome-vfs magic I assume

Actually, running gDesklets with 256 Megs RAM on a Celeron 800 MHz machine (my old PC) gets to be an overkill sometimes Hence, I’m loving my 1 Gig RAM

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‘After fretting full day over why isn’t Fedora 7 showing both of the Cores of my processor, I finally managed to find the solution & as it turned out, it was mentioned in the Fedora7 Common bugs. There’s a bug filled too – Fedora devel bug 241249.

The solution, as suggested in the bug report is simple – just append  “clocksource=acpi_pm” to your kernel options in /etc/grub.conf

Nice!!!

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Just managed to get the webcam on my Dell XPS M1210 working in Fedora 7 – many thanks to the Gentoo Wiki…

LuvcView in action…

LuvcView also supports still picture capture & AVI capture

However, I’m still unable to run the same Logitech camera with any of other apps. Kopete just shows a green box in the webcam placeholder as of now

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Yesternight, I finally installed Fedora 7 on my laptop – only to find the boot process was hanging at “Uncompressing linux kernel” message. Adding an “acpi=off” to grub did the trick.

Out of the box support for Dell XPS M1210 with default (& full) installation of Fedora seemed a bit lacking to me.

• The Wifi interface, though was shown detected, was not working (ipw2200 was installed by default)
• Sound did not worked – on & after Firstboot
• Graphics were not sharp, although F7 did picked up the max default resolution for the laptop – 1280×800

Other issues were

• NTFS partition, containing Vista were not available (obvious reasons) [Update - ntfs-3g is indeed available on the Fedora install DVD, I might have overlooked the fact that its already installed.]
• MP3 could not be played (obvious reasons)

However, the function keys & the touch pad worked quite as expected.
I did though of trying Ubuntu for a second, but then Fedora was not bad atall – specially when I get all the *-debug rpm’s prebuilt So I decided to plug in my ethernet jack & solve all the problems one at a time – & as it turned out, people had already faced & solved these problems for FC6.

Some very good links that I found were FC6 Tips & Tricks (v1.3) and Personal FC6 Installation guide

More information about XPS 1210′s hardware is on Gentoo Wiki – here & here.

So, after spending some time on internet, I managed to solve audio, video problems. Audio just started working by itself since I ran system-config-soundcard & clicked “Reload Audio Drivers”. Video is now crisp & clear with Nvidia Drivers installed. NTFS partitions can be easily mounted using ntfs-3g. For MP3 support, please head over to the above two links.

I also did managed to get ipw3945 on my system, wifi is up again – I still need to test it at Sandy’s place tonight with his Wifi router.

The leftovers now…

• The Ricoh card reader
• Dual headphone jacks
• Logitech Cam & Mike – detection, hotkey, video streaming…
• The touchpad seems to be a bit scary when doing horizontal movements. Even the slightest touch sometimes makes FF to go back/forth in history. My Bro’s HP has one of the softest & best touchpad I’ve ever used. It just seems to magically know that when you want to click & when you want to scroll… wow!
• Media control buttons on the laptop
• Power management, Suspend to RAM when laptop’s lid id is closed, etc…

If I can somehow finish this list, the support for Dell XPS M1210 might be F&F!!!

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Planning to buy a digital camera any soon? Baffled by so many choices available? Need advice?

…Have a look at 25 things you mush know before buying a digital camera

Bored with your mouse cursor? Try DMZ (i’m currently relishing on the bigger sized ones!)

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If you had been in my shoes today, you would have loved this idea – which just struck me!

My ATI display had a compatibility problem with the projector in room 407 @ GNUnify & I had to resort to using the laptops available with the organizers – which had a series of problems! How to get past such a thing if it happens again?

Very simple!

Start vino-prefrences on your laptop

Run organizer’s laptop with the projector

Use vncviewer to connect back to your machine for a full-screen display!

Voila! You’ll have your own desktop in seconds! – thanks to a cross cable or WiFi

But whatever problems or not, the organizers & about 97 student staff (as I was told) did an awesome job on the day one. Never was I left alone – a volunteer was always in touch with me, be it for breakfast, my badge, a copy of schedule, setting upt the laptop or anything!

Great job guys!

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