Ah, more of my neophyte adventures with Linux. Debian was working for me for a while but then began to degrade over time. It was annoying enough that I couldn’t get the sound working but then it would refuse to display in 24 bit. Despite all of the changes I made to force a 24 bit display, it wouldn’t stick and I couldn’t take it anymore. So, I went on a hunt for a new Linux distro to experiment with and decided on Fedora Core 2.

Well, I admit, I did try to revert back to Windows one more time, but XP is still boycotting PCMCIA. Instead of fighting with Windows, I continued the search for Linux. With Windows, there isn’t a bunch of fixes you can try, well, in my particular case I mean, with my ThinkPad 600e. I’ve found that, while neither OSs are flawless, Linux gives me the ability to try more than two things to work, if that makes sense to anybody. Moving on….

At first I was going to use Gentoo but decided on Fedora Core 2. I figured if it’s based on Red Hat I’d be able to find a little bit more stability and support for everything that goes wrong with ThinkPads.

The installation was extremely simple using the graphical method. However, the process itself was almost 80 minutes. Whew.

Upon first boot I noticed that it was trying to load the network before it loaded the PCMCIA nic, which resulted in errors and internet access was…well, inaccessible. After a little bit of searching, I came across a fix by removing the ‘alias eth0′ line from the modprobe.conf file. Which worked, but then on my second reboot it no longer worked. So what I did was, remove network loading on boot and now I manually start the network once I’m logged in using the command, “service network start”, which works fine. I’d rather have a permanent fix. Luckily, this problem isn’t uncommon, so I anticipate a solid fix for this soon.

For package management I installed Apt and Fedora comes with Yum, which works like apt. This works okay, kind of slow, and I miss the huge reservoir of packages offered through apt from Debian.

My screen depth and resolution has stayed consistent, which is nice. Of course, there’s always the one thing that just doesn’t seem to work: SOUND. Now, at first, I didn’t care but the more I use the laptop the more I long to listen to music. Hopefully, I’ll be able to find a solution for this, until then, I’m satisfied for right now, but being such and OS whore, I’ll probably be installing something new very soon.

If by any chance any of you own a ThinkPad 600(e) and run Linux, I’d love to know which distro you use and which you think works best, as far as getting everything working, including sound.