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Scientific Linux 6 on a S10-3

 

July 16 2011

I have installed Scientific Linux 6 on my Lenovo S10-3 netbook and everything works, albeit with some effort. Some issues I had:

  • Updating the kernel causes the system to crash at boot time. The workaround is to use an older kernel that doesn't crash; right now I'm using OpenVZ's older 2.6.32-042test008 kernel.
  • The Broadcom wifi driver needs to be downloaded and installed from Broadcom's web site. I'm using a file called hybrid-portsrc_x86_64-v5_100_82_38.tar.gz. One gotcha is to make sure there are no spaces anywhere in the path to this file or it won't compile. Networking is actually better in Linux than in Windows.
  • Some S10-3 computers have an Atheros wifi card instead of a Broadcom one; this card also has Linux-compatible drivers.
  • Setting the screen brightness requires an incantation like setpci -s 00:02.0 F4.B=ff (full brightness) or setpci -s 00:02.0 F4.B=80 (half brightness).
  • The 32-bit static Skype client works on the 64-bit kernel after installing all of the 32-bit compatibility libs.
  • The system doesn't come with mp3 codecs, because of the patent issues.

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