Sfink/Laptop Setup

I was issued a ThinkPad T510 laptop, apparently to stun any marauding elephants that might endanger my safety. It's heavy.

BIOS

(This did not happen in this order, but the mythical reader of this page would be better off if they did this first.)

On a whim, I checked how much physical memory was installed: 8GB. Cool! Unfortunately, it was only seeing 4GB. Same on Windows. Problem turned out to be the BIOS, so after wasting half a day tracking it down, I reflashed and now have 8GB.

OS Installation

It came preinstalled with Windows 7. Partitions were:

• (unallocated): Looks like there's some hidden stuff at the beginning
• sda1: looks like the boot partition
• sda2: main Windows partition
• sda3: 10GB Lenovo restore partition

I installed Fedora 13 on it.

• Needed to alter boot command line to pass intel_iommu=off or it would spew errors constantly and fail to install.
• I resized the main Windows partition, and then backed up the restore partition onto it and blew that restore partition away. (I needed a partition for LVM + a boot partition.)
• I made a 500MB boot partition and the rest an extended partition with an LVM partition inside it.
• Then I made logical volumes for / and /home and swap. Good enough.

Packages

• zsh
• emacs
• mercurial
• gpointing-device-settings
• a whole bunch of stuff for building Mozilla

 yum install \
   zip gcc-c++ glib2-devel gtk2-devel fontconfig-devel libnotify-devel \
   libIDL-devel alsa-lib-devel libXt-devel freetype-devel pkgconfig \
   dbus-glib-devel curl-devel autoconf213 xorg-x11-proto-devel libX11-devel \
   libXau-devel libXext-devel wireless-tools-devel glibc-static yasm

• I wonder if 'yum-builddep firefox' would have worked for that last one...

Touchpad

Install gpointing-device-settings. Under "tapping", add some time to the top slider. Then go to System/Preferences/Mouse and enable tapping to click.

Focus Follows Mouse

Gnome has decided in all their wisdom to use the stupid click-to-focus model. Fortunately, Fedora has a way to revert to focus-follows-mouse: install the control-panel-extra RPM, go to System/Preferences/Windows, and check "Select windows when mouse the mouse moves over them".