Archive for January, 2009

GSynaptics touchpad on Fedora 10 + HAL

Thursday, January 29th, 2009

If you have a laptop, you probably have a TouchPad which is driven by the “synaptics” driver. To configure your TouchPad, you probably always used the GSynaptics utility, right? This utility required to modify your xorg.conf, but we don’t have this file in Fedora 10 anymore…so what now?

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Posted in CentOS, Fedora, General Linux | 21 Comments »

Lenovo ThinkPad x301 with Fedora 10 quick review

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

Since a couple of months, I wanted to change my heavy laptop (a HP6710, around 3KG) for a lighter one because I’m walking with this thing on my back for around 1h every day and my back hurts :)

At some point, I was very interested in the new 12″ netbooks like the Dell Mini 12 but due to the lack of power and the nonexistent graphic drivers for Linux, I had to look for something else…Lenovo always made very neat sub-notebooks, but they are expensive as hell.

Fortunately for me, we can buy them with a heavy discount at school, and that’s exactly what I did! I got a Lenovo ThinkPad x301 for around 1500€.

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Posted in Fedora | 14 Comments »

OpenSolaris at HEIG-VD

Friday, January 23rd, 2009

Yesterday there was an OpenSolaris install party/workshop/presentation at my school, the HEIG-VD. The presentation was made by the Swiss OpenSolaris User Group which were very nice and open about other operating systems :)

Honestly, I didn’t know much about OpenSolaris, so I went there to open my horizon a little bit and it turned out to be very interesting! We mostly discussed about technologies implemented in OpenSolaris 2008.11 and made parallels with Fedora and Linux in general. There were talks about:

  • OpenSolaris history
  • The ZFS Filesystem, perhaps the most interesting part, it was a  live demo of the ZFS filesystem made by Javier Conde, a Sun engineer.
  • The OpenSolaris application packaging and repositories configuration
  • Virtualization containers, and how to run native Linux apps in them
  • The DTrace tool to analyze software

Posted in /dev/null | No Comments »

Live (MSN) Messenger is broken in Pidgin

Monday, January 12th, 2009

All the people using Microsoft’s Live (MSN) Messenger protocol with Pidgin (any OS) or Adium on OS X may have noticed that it wasn’t possible to connect to their prefered IM network since this morning. The reason is that Microsoft changed something in the protocol…as far as I know, they have retired protocol version 15 or 16 that Pidgin/Adium are using.

There are 3 solutions to this problem at the moment:

  • Install Empathy + Butterfly plugin (yum install empathy telepathy-butterfly)
  • Install the MSN-Pecan plugin for Pidgin, from http://code.google.com/p/msn-pecan/
  • Wait for an update ;)

I hope this quick post helps…

Posted in /dev/null | 3 Comments »