Upgrade to Fedora 15 on Acer 3810T laptop

Posted Sat 23 July 2011 in computing

At one time I would upgrade very soon after a new release came out. These days there is rarely any must-have new features, so I have been leaving upgrades later and later. This time, so much so that I have completely skipped F14 and gone straight to F15.

A number of things have changed and the following notes may be useful.

I installed the 64 bit version of fedora on this machine. Everything went without any problems during the install.

In general everything just works as you would expect and as previously. This biggest change probably gnome-shell and I will probably write something separate on that, but there is no problems with the video driver, it works very smoothly on this machine, unlike on my desktop machine where it was just about unusable out of the box. Suspend

This works fine although you still have to add the option i8042.reset=1 to the kernel command line in /boot/grub/grub.conf.

On resume, the wireless network took a long time to reconnect, to solve this I had to set IPv6 to None in the wireless options of network settings. Touchpad

The way to configure the touchpad has changed, you no longer use HAL to do this.

Go to the directory /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d and create a file called (for exmaple, anything similar will do), 20-touch.conf with the following:

Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "Touch pad button config"
    MatchIsTouchpad "on"
    Driver "synaptics"

    Option "TapButton1" "1"
    Option "LTCornerButton" "2"
    # Any other options you like (see man synaptics for a list)
EndSection

This enables tapping the touchpad for a left-click, and a middle click by tapping the top left hand corner of the pad. Although you can configure tapping once you have logged in, this change is needed so that you can tap to click on the log in screen too.

I've grown to like having the top left hand corner produce a middle click. Using two fingers as the middle button is an alternative, but is not supported directly by my touchpad and although you can emulate it, I've just grown used to the corner tap so didn't bother to set it up.

Posted by Steve