Archive for November, 2008

Installing Fedora 10 on a MacBook

Saturday, November 29th, 2008

This guide will help you through all the steps necessary for installing Fedora 10 on a MacBook Santa Rosa. This guide is currently aimed at Fedora 10 x86_64 but will also work on i386 version (adjust as necessary). Most of the steps equally apply to pre-Santa Rosa models too.

These instructions will work with the MacBook 3,1 (Late 2007) and newer but will NOT work with the new aluminium MacBooks since they have different hardware (especially the graphics card). These instructions are not suitable for the MacBook Pro either!!

This guide is based largely around my previous guide for Fedora 8, and again much credit goes to the people who created the original Ubuntu wiki guide.

What works and what doesn't?

There are a few things that need fixing (covered in detail below) but the following all work "out of the box" with Fedora 10: video/graphics, compiz effects, firewire, CD/DVD reading and writing, function keys (brightness, volume etc), sound, and ethernet. Even the new "plymouth" graphical boot screen works fine once activated.

I have yet to try the infrared or connecting an external monitor. Everything else works with the tweaks described below, except for suspend and hibernate which seem generally pretty broken in F10 (as it was in F9 too). Update 7 November 2008: Suspend and hibernate are fixed with 2.6.27.7-134 kernel and newer. See bug report.

(more...)

Wordpress default theme 1024 wide

Saturday, November 29th, 2008

I love the Wordpress default theme based on the famous Kubrick theme but it has two problems in my eyes:

  • There are no sidebars on posts or pages making navigation kind of tricky.
  • It is designed for 800 pixel wide screens. This was fine 3 years ago but now 95% of people use at least 1024 so its a waste of screen real-estate having all that grey at the sides.

I am lazy so looked around for a version that fixed these issues but couldn't find one. So, I took a few minutes to make some adjustments and solve these two problems. The result, that you're looking at now, is an exact replica of the default Wordpress theme but enlarged for viewing at 1024 pixels and with sidebars on pages and posts. Other than that it is identical - and even the dynamic colour changing header image still works.

I submitted the theme to Wordpress for publication but meanwhile you can download it here (if you like!).

Update: 2 December 2008 - Wordpress.org rejected my theme for publication - no reason given it just disappeared. I think that's pretty lame. The least they could do is provide a reason. I won't bother ever submitting anything else to them.

RPM installation of Broadcom 802.11 STA wireless driver in Fedora 8/9/10

Saturday, November 15th, 2008

RPMs for the Broadcom 802.11 STA Wireless Driver are now available from the rpmfusion.org repos for Fedora 8, 9 and 10.

This is an official-release of Broadcom's IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n hybrid Linux device driver for use with Broadcom's BCM4311-, BCM4312-, BCM4321-, and BCM4322-based hardware. This driver also supports the incorrectly identified BCM4328 chipset which is actually a BCM4321 or BCM4322 chipset.

Previously I explained how to build the Broadcom STA driver from source but now the installation and updates can all be taken care of using yum and the rpmfusion non-free repository. Just follow these two simple steps:

(more...)