Red Hat Linux on a Compaq Presario 2538cl Notebook
Wednesday, October 29, 2003
 
This blog has been relocated to boshoff.za.net.
- posted by Jan @ 14:55
Thursday, October 09, 2003
 
I decided to give the kernel.org kernels a shot, instead of using Red Hat's kernels. Here's the log of how I set up the kernel.

Actually, I first tried only running the kernel with acpi patched in (no swsusp), but the kernel freezes during start-up at kudzu (Checking for new hardware...). I haven't played around with it a lot yet, I'll ask around first and see if I can get to run as smoothly as the RH kernel first.

This post will now supersede that of May 26th.


Now it's a matter of getting Software Suspend to work, I haven't tried yet. It will have to wait until I have some time!
- posted by Jan @ 09:26
Tuesday, September 23, 2003
 
My to-do list currently stands at:


  1. Enabling software suspend. I stumbled upon the Software Suspend site at Sourceforge. Will try to incorporate this. Wondering whether it will shorten boot time?
  2. I'd like set up digital video editing on Linux. This would require compiling and installing some libraries and software. I'll document progress etc. here.
  3. Think about re-arranging some of the info on this site. The blog is nice, but makes it rather hard to get to stuff.

- posted by Jan @ 13:00
Friday, August 29, 2003
 
Okay, here's the comment about automatically saving a .emf file from grace.

After installing pstoedit, and making sure that it can succesfully convert .eps to .emf, add the following line to gracerc in ~/.grace:

DEFINE OFILTER "pstoedit -f emf - %s" PATTERN "*.emf"

Then when specifying the filename with a .emf extension under the "Print Setup" menu (and selecting the eps print device) it will filter it automatically through pstoedit. Still a little tedious, but quicker than doing it all manually.
- posted by Jan @ 18:39
Wednesday, August 20, 2003
 
I'm interested in being able to save Grace graph files to wmf/emf. So I found a neat library, libEMF, which I think might be able to do this. Downloaded libEMF from the SourceForge site, together with the patch that is also on that site. Then also downloaded the neat package pstoedit.



  1. Applied the patch to the libEMF directory: cat libEMF-1.0.fixes-2002-09-30.diff | patch -p1
  2. ./configure;make;make install
  3. In the pstoedit directory, also do ./configure;make;make install
  4. At least now I'm able to convert eps to emf with pstoedit -f wmf file.eps file.emf which produces vector graphs for ease of use in Windows Apps.


Will comment later on how to possibly automatically include this in Grace using some kind of filter.
- posted by Jan @ 17:29
Tuesday, July 22, 2003
 
Downloaded and installed the new kernel today. Recompiled according to my previous post.

Also installed Intel Fortran Compiler today. Since there is an incompatibility between ifc and the new glibc libraries used by RH9, I followed some suggestions that I found in an Intel forum. It basically comes down to


  1. Downloaded glibc-2.2.93-5.i686.rpm from the RH8.0 distribution at a Red Hat FTP mirror.
  2. Extracted the old libraries from the rpm with the commands:
    rpm2cpio glibc-2.2.93-5.i686.rpm | cpio -idv ./lib/i686/libc-2.2.93.so ./lib/i686/libc.so.6 ./lib/libc-2.2.93.so ./lib/libc.so.6 ./lib/libcrypt-2.2.93.so ./lib/libcrypt.so.1
    rpm2cpio glibc-2.2.93-5.i686.rpm | cpio -idv ./lib/i686/libpthread-0.10.so ./lib/i686/libpthread.so.0 ./lib/libpthread-0.10.so ./lib/libpthread.so.0
  3. Copied the newly created lib directory to the Intel install directory:
    mkdir /usr/local/intel/old_libs; cp -r ./lib/* /usr/local/intel/old_libs/
  4. Edited /usr/local/intel/compiler70/ia32/bin/ifc.cfg to contain:
    -L/usr/local/intel/old_libs -lc-2.2.93

- posted by Jan @ 20:10
Saturday, July 12, 2003
 
Found drivers today for the video card! The performance is no doubt a lot better than with the VESA driver. It seems to provide 2D acceleration, which makes a big difference in your interaction with Gnome! Sylvestre Ledru has a site in which he documented installation of Linux on his Presario 2500. He also has a link to the driver, with installation instructions. If his site is down for some reason. Here's my copy of it. Basically, you just untar and run ./install. Also, edit /etc/X11/XF86Config to contain the following:

Section "Device"
   Identifier "ATI"
   Driver "radeon"
   VendorName "ATI Radeon"
   BoardName "Mobility U1"
   VideoRam 65536
EndSection


And remember to point the "Screen" section to this device.
- posted by Jan @ 20:43

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