Saturday, October 25, 2008

Fedora 9 on lenovo 3000 N200

My lenovo 3000 N200 was sick last week.
I have a dual boot win xp and fedora 9 setup. It worked for a few months..Then the agony...
The laptop would shutdown suddenly, or while booting and sometimes it even would wake up by itself although it was shutdown (like a zombie). Scary !!.

After some initial struggle and making dozens of calls to Lenovo support centre, a techie told me that N200 has a problem with BIOS and I had to reset it to defaults.

Well I did it. Guess what - my windows xp BSOD started showing up on startup.
Fedora 9 also was crashing now.

Luckily I had fedora 9 setup cd and after a re-install things were normal with fedora. However the windows BSOD persists.
Tried to get hold of a windows XP cd, but unfortunately though I am able to but up with win xp, it simply says setup is now checking.... and simply hangs with Black screen...Seems like it's not able to detect HDD

Anyway I got fedora 9 with internet working fine.
However I had a problem with sound. As per a forum i setup sound and it worked like a charm. The fix was:
In /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base add a line
options snd-hda-intel model=lenovo.
Restart, voila sound's good.

Next with fedora, i was not able to play mp3,
After some searching around, I got a cool tool for fedora 9, it is named easylife - an opensource project. This installs all the required software on fedora at one go. Like skype, adobe, flash, etc. Everything is taken care under the hood.
next flash on fedora was not working..
Had to checkout if it was 64 bit installation using $uname -a
Yes it was for me and hence followed below instructions:

Installation on Fedora 64-bit

The following steps are required for Fedora 64-bit users.

First install the Adobe YUM repository, as stated above:

[mirandam@charon Download]$ sudo mkdir -p /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins
[mirandam@charon Download]$ sudo yum install nspluginwrapper.{i386,x86_64} pulseaudio-libs.i386 libflashsupport.i386
[mirandam@charon Download]$ sudo yum install flash-plugin

[mirandam@charon Download]$ sudo mozilla-plugin-config -i -g -v

This was adapted from the Fedora 9 Release Notes.

NOTE - PulseAudio - I was able to hear sound properly in both Gnome and KDE in Firefox when PulseAudio was enabled.

I'm yet to try this link to revive win xp.. http://forums.lenovo.com/lnv/board/message?board.id=N_Series_Lenovo_3000&thread.id=269

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