July 2006 Archives
2006-07-15 13:29:44
FC5 on my work laptop
I've gotten my work laptop (IBM T60) working quite nicely with Fedora these days. The ATI X1300 works, the wireless ipw3945 works great, the sleep function works, Xgl works. It's a pleasant environment to work in, and I can access the NTFS partition to get files that I've created in Windows. The only thing I need to work on is power management. The battery doesn't last long in FC5, and I think that's because it runs all the components at full power unless I intervene.
The Windows environment shits me. I get constantly spammed by the utilities that are supposed to be there to help. If they go wrong, I can't get deep enough into the configuration to find out why. Support is restricted to paid support pages or phone numbers manned by people that don't know what they're doing. The Windows offline files function stores files in an obscure format, so if I can't access them from Fedora.
The FedoraForum was a great place to find instructions on Xgl. A forum member there called ework had put together a repository will all the good stuff. Livna, of course, I knew well from getting nVidia drivers for my home workstation, and had the drivers I needed for the X1300 card in my work laptop.
Playing around with the free VMware downloads has meant that I can put Windows XP into a VMware partition on FC5. This is excellent for supporting those applications that can't otherwise be run from FC5. Specifically, Outlook 2003 and IBM's eConfig don't have perfect alternatives for running them under FC5.
Evolution is really good and gets very close with the Exchange connector, but I've still not gotten the address book stuff working, and calendars don't work perfectly. Unfortunately, this is important stuff for my work.
I've had a go at running eConfig under Wine, but there's tricky stuff required for Java support. I might have another go in the future, but for now, I can run XP under VMware and migrate applications over time, rather than having to boot into one operating system at a time.
My colleague at work has been blazing this trail with some help from me. The great thing about this, is that he can setup all the SOE applications in his VM, and when it's all good, I can take a copy of the VM and run it on my machine. This means no painful Windows installation. Woohoo!
The only things I need to worry about are: making sure the Windows SID is changed on my copy of the VM; using a different license key for Windows; changing the system name.
As my colleague pointed out, if your Windows system is part of a domain, then just re-adding it to the domain will change the SIDs used as part of that domain. If it's part of a workgroup, then not changing the SID will mean that two machines will effectively think that they are the same entity. This is bad from a security point of view, and I'm sure that there are other things that could go wrong as a consequence.
Anyway, SysInternals have a great tool for creating a new SID, called NewSID. I haven't tried it yet, but the description satisfies all the requirements I have.
So, with FC5 and Xgl and VMware working, I can do funky things like this on my T60:
The Windows environment shits me. I get constantly spammed by the utilities that are supposed to be there to help. If they go wrong, I can't get deep enough into the configuration to find out why. Support is restricted to paid support pages or phone numbers manned by people that don't know what they're doing. The Windows offline files function stores files in an obscure format, so if I can't access them from Fedora.
The FedoraForum was a great place to find instructions on Xgl. A forum member there called ework had put together a repository will all the good stuff. Livna, of course, I knew well from getting nVidia drivers for my home workstation, and had the drivers I needed for the X1300 card in my work laptop.
Playing around with the free VMware downloads has meant that I can put Windows XP into a VMware partition on FC5. This is excellent for supporting those applications that can't otherwise be run from FC5. Specifically, Outlook 2003 and IBM's eConfig don't have perfect alternatives for running them under FC5.
Evolution is really good and gets very close with the Exchange connector, but I've still not gotten the address book stuff working, and calendars don't work perfectly. Unfortunately, this is important stuff for my work.
I've had a go at running eConfig under Wine, but there's tricky stuff required for Java support. I might have another go in the future, but for now, I can run XP under VMware and migrate applications over time, rather than having to boot into one operating system at a time.
My colleague at work has been blazing this trail with some help from me. The great thing about this, is that he can setup all the SOE applications in his VM, and when it's all good, I can take a copy of the VM and run it on my machine. This means no painful Windows installation. Woohoo!
The only things I need to worry about are: making sure the Windows SID is changed on my copy of the VM; using a different license key for Windows; changing the system name.
As my colleague pointed out, if your Windows system is part of a domain, then just re-adding it to the domain will change the SIDs used as part of that domain. If it's part of a workgroup, then not changing the SID will mean that two machines will effectively think that they are the same entity. This is bad from a security point of view, and I'm sure that there are other things that could go wrong as a consequence.
Anyway, SysInternals have a great tool for creating a new SID, called NewSID. I haven't tried it yet, but the description satisfies all the requirements I have.
So, with FC5 and Xgl and VMware working, I can do funky things like this on my T60: