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Posted on 3/27/2009 10:13:00 am by Nicolas and filed under , , , ,
I've been the lucky owner of a Thinkpad x300 for a couple of weeks now... Brilliant ultra-portable laptop!! Just trying to summarize some of the installation/configuration steps I went through to get the machine working with my favourite softwares.

Almost everything worked out-of-the-box:
Hard disk password protection
Fingerprint reader
Wifi
Bluetooth
Webcam
Trackpoint/Touchpad
USB & USB mouse
Integrated keyboard light
DVD burner
Suspend/Hibernate


Then came configuration time...

1. Install Firefox
Then added my usual plugins: Adblock Plus, Foxmarks, LastPass

2. Configure SUDO so that my user is granted "superuser" authorizations and does not have to type in the root password each time
This was done via:
[nicolas@hector ~]$ su
Password:
[root@hector nicolas]# echo 'nicolas ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL' >> /etc/sudoers

3. Setup YUM
For applications that are against Fedora licensing guidelines (typically MP3 and DVD players that will rely on proprietary formats), a 3rd party repository will have to be configured. For Fedora 10 this will be RPMFusion.
To set up the RPMFusion repositories:
[nicolas@hector ~]$ sudo rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm
[nicolas@hector ~]$ sudo rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm
[nicolas@hector ~]$ sudo rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmfusion-*

4. Media players
For the installation of MPLAYER through yum (RPMFusion enabled!):
[nicolas@hector TEMP]$ sudo yum install mplayer mplayer-gui gecko-mediaplayer mencoder
For VLC:
[nicolas@hector TEMP]$ sudo yum install vlc

5. Fonts
The "official" source for the Microsoft's TrueType fonts for Linuxes can be found here
. Apparently, there's been a request for RPMFusion to include this package. But for the moment, you have to build your own RPM package using the msttcorefonts SPEC file provided by the above web site.
[nicolas@hector TEMP]$ sudo rpmbuild -bb msttcorefonts-2.0-1.spec
[nicolas@hector TEMP]$ sudo rpm -ivh $HOME/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.noarch.rpm

That said, Fedora encourages the use of the Liberation Fonts. They should get installed by default, but in case they're not, yum can install them:
[nicolas@hector TEMP]$ sudo yum install liberation-fonts

6. Adobe Flash
There's an option here. In short, the traditionnal way is to install the plugin nspluginwrapper as explained in the Fedora Wiki. That said, Adobe also offer an alpha version of a 64-bit plugin. Since it has been released a couple of months ago without any major issues being reported so far, I've opted for the latter. Full details can be found on the Adobe Labs web site.

Both installation methods gave good results on my machine. I've decided to stick with the alpha 64-bit package and installed the extracted libflashplayer.so to the system-wide /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/ rather than my user's ~/.mozilla/plugins/:
[nicolas@hector Download]$ ll libfl*
-rw-rw-r-- 1 nicolas nicolas 3729613 2009-03-27 08:28 libflashplayer-10.0.22.87.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz
-rwxr-xr-x 1 nicolas nicolas 9543400 2009-02-03 04:03 libflashplayer.so
[nicolas@hector Download]$ sudo cp ./libflashplayer.so /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so
[nicolas@hector Download]$ ll /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libfl*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 9543400 2009-03-27 08:39 /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so

NB: T&C's from Adobe read as follows:
Important: Installing the Flash Player prerelease means you have accepted the terms of the Adobe Software License Agreement. This is prerelease software, not a final release.

Here's how the alpha 64-bit plugin displayed in Firefox:
File name: libflashplayer.so
Shockwave Flash 10.0 r22

7. Adobe Acrobat
To view PDF files, Fedora includes evince, however you may prefer to install the Adobe plugin.
This can be done via YUM after setting up the Adobe repository:
[nicolas@hector Download]$ sudo rpm -ivh
http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
[nicolas@hector Download]$ sudo rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux
[nicolas@hector Download]$ sudo yum install AdobeReader_enu

NB: Above steps are valid for the English version (the enu suffix). To list the different languages supported in Adobe's YUM repository, run the following command:
[nicolas@hector Download]$ yum list AdobeReader*
Other languages can be installed as above, just change the suffix of the AdobeReader package accordingly.

8. Sun Java
Once again, Fedora comes with a default OpenJDK, but you can download the Sun Java.
To do so, get the Java package from:
http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp
Select Java SE Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 Update 13 (or the full JDK). Then pick the "Linux x64" version. After that, select your language and view/accept the license agreement. On the next page, select the RPM option:
Java SE Runtime Environment 6u13
jre-6u13-linux-x64-rpm.bin 18.20 MB (64-bit users)

To install:
[nicolas@hector Download]$ sudo sh jre-6u13-linux-x64-rpm.bin

Finally, to setup the Sun JRE:
[nicolas@hector Download]$ sudo /usr/sbin/alternatives --install /usr/bin/java java /usr/java/default/bin/java 20000

The Mozilla browser plugin for 64-bit users:
[nicolas@hector Download]$ sudo /usr/sbin/alternatives --install /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin.so libjavaplugin.so.x86_64 /usr/java/jre1.6.0_13/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so 20000

NB: When updating the JRE package, simply download the newest RPM package and install as above. There will be no need to reset alternatives, as those settings should remain intact.

9. Virtual memory (VM) filesystems
There many good reasons to use tmpfs, Daniel Robbins summarized them brilliantly (and much better than I would...) on developerworks.

Additionally, for my personal use, I like the possibility to:
-clean up the content of tempfs filesystems at each reboot
-store sensible data (typically encryption keys) on such a transient media
-preserve my SSD life expectancy

By default with Fedora 10, /dev/shm is already a tmpfs. So I just add the following 2 lines to my /etc/fstab to make /tmp and /var/tmp two other ramdisk-like filesystems:
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,nodev,nosuid,mode=1777,size=1024M 0 0
tmpfs /var/tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777,size=512M 0 0

On my other laptop (with a traditional HD), the use of ramdisks FS increased the global performances of the machine. This is not guaranteed on an x300 with an SSD, but would have to be checked/confirmed.



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