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NOTE I've upgraded to Fedora Core 5 and everything seems to be working out of the box, including suspend to RAM! Note that this document is still very much a work in progress and depends heavily on previous work by others. At last I've hibernation working!

The hardware

Preparing your disk

You'll need a bootable cd with a partition editor that can handle ntfs. Knoppix will provide you with qtparted that lets you resize your ntfs partition. parted as distributed on the fedora core 3 disks will NOT do! (maybe the one on the rescue cd will, but I haven't tried it.

Installing Fedora Core 3

• fetching a DVD distribution
Because my 5160 has a DVD drive it makes sense to use a DVD iso instead of monkeying around with 4 CD's. Not every ftp program or browser is able to handle files larger than 2 GB correctly so it's prudent to check the MD5 checksums provided. Openssl can calculate this checksum for you and is available for windows as well.
• basic installation
Basic installation is as simple as advertised: just boot from the DVD (change the boot order in the BIOS first) and follow the instructions.
• configuring your network
At some point in the installation process you will be asked to configure your network. When installing from DVD or CD this can be skipped and deferred to a later point in time. Built in ethernet will probably work at this point but my wireless pcmcia card probaly won't.
• configuring X
This used to be the tricky part, and still is a bit. The Xconfiguration apperently goes well enough, you can actually select a Dell Laptop LCD display at 1400 x 1050, and the NVIDIA video card is correctly detected, but after resetting the display to its new configuration it hangs, showing a black screen with a still hourglass cursor. However, rebooting the system (from harddisk), goes fine, and after the familiar initialization stuff, you 're greeted with the fedora graphical login screen in the correct resolution.

Testing

Summary

component	description	result
graphics card	GeForce FX Go5200 64MB	works out of the box
touchpad	Symantics touchpad	works out of the box
sound		works out of the box
modem		not yet tested
ethernet	built-in ethernet	works out of the box
wireless	Lucent/Orinoco 802.11b PCMCIA card	works out of the box
usb memory	128 MB	works out of the box
dvd		writing CDs works, DVDs not yet tested
acpi		works mostly: hibernation and throttling tested

Remarks

Graphics card

The NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5200 64MB is correctly detected. It seems to function well, so there`s no need to download the nvidia drivers seperately, although there might be some speed advantage there. This may also prevent the rather curious problem that every second boot hangs on starting X! (forcebly powering down and rebooting solves this, but it happens again and again). For now I can stop this by preventing the haldaemon to start in runlevel 5, but this certainly is not an optimal solution since it prevents my usb memory key from being automounted.

DVD

Reading from DVD obviously works (otherwise I couldn't have installed it from DVD, but I haven't yet tried burning a DVD. Writing CDs works ok. I used 'k3b' to write an iso-image and this checked out well, although the speed was only about 4x. The drive is advertised as a 24x speed for burning and I'm not sure what's causing this. The media I used (TDK) can be written at 24x in a Plextor drive, so I guess that shouldn't be the problem.

ACPI

Suspending and speedstepping are a must have, however even powering down is a problem when the wireless card is still in its PCMCIA slot! This is what i will focus on the coming days. Throttling works fine: just putting a number between 0 (100%) to 7 (12%) into the appropriate device files works:

 echo -n 6 > /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/throttling
 

if you run 'glxgears' at the same time you actually see the speedreduction take effect. After some time you will also hear the fan slow down and you can have a peek at the current temperature:

 cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THM/temperature
 

Hibernation (suspending) now works. To be exact: suspending to disk works, I haven't yet tested other modes (like suspend to ram). Basically Mathias Hensler did all the work providing pre-built kernel upgrades with softwaresuspend enabled. Thanks mate! I followed his exact instructions and used the latest version for FC3. I had to resolve some dependencies on selinux rpms, but you can get them from the updates section of every fedora mirror.

His hibernate.conf worked out of the box for me. I still have to do some tweaks to get the lid to initiate a hibernate, but the basics are working now!

Wireless

Inserting the pcmcia card produces the following errors:

 Nov 17 17:02:51 pumba cardmgr[2140]: socket 0: Lucent Technologies WaveLAN/IEEE Adapter
 Nov 17 17:02:57 pumba wait_for_sysfs[4393]: either wait_for_sysfs (udev 039) needs an update to handle the device '/class/net/eth1' properly (no device symlink) or the sysfs-support of your device's driver needs to be fixed, please report to 
 

It does work however, and may be configured with 'ifconfig' or the RedHat network config tool. (tip: insert the card and then use that tool: you can then just select your hardware device instead of guessing what it will be. The config parameters are written to the file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1 so you may review them if you like)

USB Memory key

usb memory key works out of the box. It automounts as a scsi device. Don't forget to u(n)mount it manually though, or you'll lose files, and see my remarks on the graphics card.

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