I tried installing Fedora Core 6 on my laptop the day before the official release of the distribution (Thanks BitTorrent). It didn't work so well. X would not load, complaining about DRI support for Screen0. I tried to install the kmod-nvidia driver from livna, but it complained that I had the wrong kernel installed. Apparently, I had a i586 kernel when I needed a i686 kernel.
This really seemed whacked.
I decided to put FC5 back on for the time being.
Fast forward to a week later. FC6 has been out for a few days and this kernel issue I had has turned up as a common problem for which a couple workarounds have been published.
So, tonight I tried again. Using the workarounds, I got X working and I got the NVidia driver working. FC6 is nice! I'm not sure exactly what the X.org guys have done with the display code, but everything looks better than FC5. Text is crisper.
I have run into one annoying problem: I can't use all the features of my ALPS/Synaptics trackpad. It's only recognized as a generic pointing device. So, I can't do horizontal or vertical scrolling or tapping in the corner for middle-click. For now, I'll get by with my optical scroll mouse, but it's annoying nonetheless.
1Glad to hear you found the workarounds for the i586 kernel issue.
As for the X synaptics driver, it is available and very easy to build and install. Visit http://web.telia.com/~u89404340/touchpad/ to download the code and find good information regarding its configuration.
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COMMENT:
DATE: 11/01/2006 08:43:41
AUTHOR: Lamont Peterson
1Oh, I meant to mention:
I think I'll build an RPM for the synaptics X driver, but I haven't had a chance to get FC6 running on my notebooks, yet. Once I have a working RPM, I'll make it available in a yum repo on my openbrainstem.net site. I will probably submit that RPM for inclusion in Fedora Extras, too.
In the meantime, download it and build it yourself. If you want, I can let you know when the RPM is ready.
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