John Smith's Blog

Ramblings (mostly) about technical stuff

The saga of getting Fedora 14 running on a Dell Mini 10 netbook - part 6 of 6

Posted by John Smith on

It's over two months since I first started this series of posts, and to be honest, anything that hasn't already been written up, I've largely forgotten about. Not to mention, Fedora 15 has since come out, so anything specific to version 14 is already out-of-date. However, after writing up so much already, it seems only right to try to come to some sort of conclusion.

First off - although it didn't come into play until later in the process - Fedora 14 initially shipped with a broken version of the pyxf86config package. This caused a failure to set the display refresh rate correctly when I got the proper drivers installed, so before doing anything, yum update that to a fixed version.

This machine uses a "Poulsboro" (aka Poulsborough aka Poulsbo) chipset, which seems notoriously ill-supported on Linux. However, there are (non-free) packages available for this chipset, I ended up installing the following:

  • kmod-psb
  • kmod-psb-PAE
  • limdrm-poulsbo
  • livna-config-display
  • psb-firmware
  • xorg-x11-drv-psb
  • xpsb-glx
The first two are "metapackages", with the actual packages being stuff with horrendous names like "kmod-psb-2.6.35.13-91.fc14.i686-4.41.1-14.fc14.11.i686".

When all this is in place, Fedora switches to the native resolution of 1366x768, and the machine is pretty much as usable as you might reasonably hope. Because of the way I installed the wifi drivers, every time I've upgraded to a new kernel, the wifi has broken. So far I've just kept with the older kernels - by selecting them via the relevant grub boot option - but I assume it's just a case of recompiling the modules under the new kernel, or hopefully replacing them with a package which will automatically update itself in line with the kernel.

Anyway, hope all this is/was of some use to someone out there...

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This blog (mostly) covers technology and software development.

Note: I've recently ported the content from my old blog hosted on Google App Engine using some custom code I wrote, to a static site built using Pelican. I've put in place various URL manipulation rules in the webserver config to try to support the old URLs, but it's likely that I've missed some (probably meta ones related to pagination or tagging), so apologies for any 404 errors that you get served.

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About the author

I'm a software developer who's worked with a variety of platforms and technologies over the past couple of decades, but for the past 7 or so years I've focussed on web development. Whilst I've always nominally been a "full-stack" developer, I feel more attachment to the back-end side of things.

I'm a web developer for a London-based equities exchange. I've worked at organizations such as News Corporation and Google and BATS Global Markets. Projects I've been involved in have been covered in outlets such as The Guardian, The Telegraph, the Financial Times, The Register and TechCrunch.

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