My old slow computers often end up in the basement headless with remote desktop enabled so I can VNC to them from my real desktop. With Fedora 12 (and possibly earlier since I skipped from Fedora 7 to Fedora 12) when I unplugged the monitor from my Fedora 12 machine it refused to start X when it booted, thus preventing VNC and making it useless.
It turns out this machine had an old nvidia graphics card so Xorg was auto-detecting the nv drivers. For some reason these drivers crash Xorg on Fedora 12 when there is no monitor. With a monitor hooked up (I tried several) it always boots fine.
I went to a manual xorg.conf file and set the driver to vesa. This fixed the problem and let me boot without a monitor and VNC in.
I did try identical xorg.conf files changing only the driver line, and having the nv drivers always crashes a machine without a monitor. Go figure.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Thinkpad T61 wireless on Fedora 12
Ok, I have a Thinkpad T61 that I installed Fedora 12 on. It has the Atheros AR5212 802.11a/b/g wireless card in it. In the continuous race for everything new, this card is no longer supported by Fedora 12.
I believe the MadWIFI drivers used to support it, but I couldn't even find a 3rd party Fedora 12 RPM for MadWIFI. So I had to build and install it from scratch. Since I couldn't find the instructions from Google on how to do this, I've included them below.
You will need to be on a network for this, so I hope you have a good old wired connection available. First you will need to be able to build kernel extensions, so you need to add some packages. You can do this from System->Administration->Add/Remove Software, or from a command line.
For building you need the packages kernel-devel and gcc and you will need root privileges to install them
We also need the subversion package to get the MadWIFI source.
Now you need to download the source. I recommend you download it to your home directory because since you don't have an RPM for this, if you ever update your kernel, you will need to do this all over again. From the directory where you want the source do:
This will have created a madwifi-ng directory, you need to go into it and build and install the program. To install you will again need root privileges.
Now you need to create the file that tells the kernel what to do with this module. The file needs to be in the /etc/modprobe.d directory and end with a .conf suffix. How about madwifi.conf?
contents of /etc/modprobe.d/madwifi.conf:
I then rebooted my machine. You may have to right-click on the Network Manager icon in the upper right and check the Enable Wireless checkbox. But after that, my wireless worked great.
Good Luck!
I believe the MadWIFI drivers used to support it, but I couldn't even find a 3rd party Fedora 12 RPM for MadWIFI. So I had to build and install it from scratch. Since I couldn't find the instructions from Google on how to do this, I've included them below.
You will need to be on a network for this, so I hope you have a good old wired connection available. First you will need to be able to build kernel extensions, so you need to add some packages. You can do this from System->Administration->Add/Remove Software, or from a command line.
For building you need the packages kernel-devel and gcc and you will need root privileges to install them
yum install kernel-devel gccWe also need the subversion package to get the MadWIFI source.
yum install subversion
Now you need to download the source. I recommend you download it to your home directory because since you don't have an RPM for this, if you ever update your kernel, you will need to do this all over again. From the directory where you want the source do:
svn checkout http://svn.madwifi-project.org/madwifi/trunk/ madwifi-ng
This will have created a madwifi-ng directory, you need to go into it and build and install the program. To install you will again need root privileges.
cd madwifi-ng
make
...
make install
Now you need to create the file that tells the kernel what to do with this module. The file needs to be in the /etc/modprobe.d directory and end with a .conf suffix. How about madwifi.conf?
contents of /etc/modprobe.d/madwifi.conf:
# Drivers that conflist with madwifi
blacklist ath9k
blacklist ath5k
# Install the module
alias wlan0 ath_pci
I then rebooted my machine. You may have to right-click on the Network Manager icon in the upper right and check the Enable Wireless checkbox. But after that, my wireless worked great.
Good Luck!
About this blog
Usually if I want to learn how to do something, I Google it. Sometimes that fails and I have to work hard to learn how to do it myself. When that happens I hope to post enough information here, that the next person, can just Google it.
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