Birch Street Computing -

about me

John M is a Linux fan in Lowell, MA.

I work at at a company writing software. I fool around with Free and Open Source software for fun & profit.

I was big into Last.fm and you can still see some of what I listen to there. I can also be found using github and recently sourcehut as well as bitbucket (historically). I don't care for most popular social media sites. If I have an account on one or the other it's probably either old and unused or was created just for tinkering.

promo

Links to things I like, use, or otherwise feel is worth sharing. Things I'd like to see get more popular.

Dell Vostro 3300 and Fedora 13

I recently got myself a Dell Vostro 3300 and am in the process of installing Linux, Fedora 13 to be specific, on it. I started out using the KDE Spin LiveCD and resizing the Windows 7 partition down to about a third of its orignal size. This was a little tricky because the Fedora automated installer saw the partition and recognized it as NTFS, but reported the size a 0 Bytes. This prevented me from running the resize tool in the Fedora installer, so I did it via the command line. I used ntfsresize(8) to shrink it, and then used manual partitioning in the Fedora installer to shrink the partition. I gave myself some wiggle room by making the partition a tad bit bigger than the size I shrunk the filesystem to.

A lot of the hardware was working right out of the box, wireless networking was the big exception. I knew the machine would come with Broadcom wireless beforehand so this was expected. After plugging into the wired lan and running the update tool I added the rpmfusion repos, and thanks to the hints on a helpful blog post I knew to install the kmod-wl package.

There is still more stuff to try out and I plan on writing about this machine a little bit in future entries.

Every blog page or article on this site is available under the CC-BY-SA license unless otherwise noted.