Installing Fedora 7 on an IBM Thinkpad R31

These notes don't go into full installation details, but provide extra information that may not easily be found.

The cursor jumping around randomly is caused by a problem in the BIOS on the R31. To correct it, edit grub.conf and add the following at the end of the kernel line:

i8042nomux=1 

This will correct the same problem in other Fedora releases as well.

GNOME At a terminal prompt type:

gnome-session-properties

Add beryl-manager to the Startup Programs section. If beryl doesn't start correctly (the beryl splash screen doesn't appear when you log in) it may be necessary to remove the file:

rm ~/.gconf/apps/gnome-session/rh/%gconf.xml

then simply log out and log back in again and you should now have GNOME with beryl!

If, after doing that, when you log in, the system closes the session and goes again to the login screen, download and install the lastest drivers for your videocard (remember to stop the X server before installing the drivers). After rebooting the system, beryl will work fine. Of course, check that your video card is in the list of supported videocards. :)

KDE

To make Beryl start automatically with KDE, open a text editor and type in:

#!/bin/bash beryl-manager

then save the file as beryl.sh (or whatever you want to call it) in the directory /home/USERNAME/.kde/Autostart/ (where USERNAME is your username). Remember that .kde is a hidden folder, so you will need to turn on viewing of hidden files/folders, or type in the location manually in the save dialogue.

Then you need to make beryl.sh executable. To do this just right click on beryl.sh, then properties > Permissions tab > tick Is executable.

If you use init 3 (i.e.: text mode) as your default runlevel, then you'll need to put the following into your /home/USERNAME/.xinitrc file:

export KDEWM=beryl exec startkde