I had previously posted about getting sound to work… the problem was that when you plugged headphones the laptop speakers would still be on and if you muted them the headphones muted… Today I dug around and found a simple solution that really works…

add the follwing line to the bottom of /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf

options snd-hda-intel model=lenovo

add the following to /etc/modprobe.conf

options snd-hda-intel model=6stack-digout

by the way, the soundcard is an intel HDA

Beryl has features such as hotkeys and and desktop switching that go much further than anything else I’ve used. On top of that, the window and desktop switching looks amazing… Desktops on a 3D cube and a killer alt-tab; AWESOME.

Pretty window animations and all sorts of crazy effects such as watter ripples when you drag and release a window or variable transparency are a few of the cool extras that some people will want to enable.

I turned off most of the effects because I’m into lite and minimal, but I couldn’t help keeping the 3D desktop switching.

I read a comment somewhere that said something like “Apple and MS give you windows but Linux gives you the whole house.” true true

I’ve been working on an OSCommerce customization for one of our clients and today I’ve done all of the php work in Quanta without ever wishing I was using something else. So far so good.

Everything is running smoothly now.

modprobe snd-hda-intel model=3stack

All good. Restart and it works.

The setup is fine other than my wifi card not working out of the box. Its an Intel 3945ABG. I know exactly what needs to happen to make it work and I’m in the process of doing it now.

As with nearly every linux intall that I’ve done, my sound is not working…. yet… but I’m confident that I will get it working quickly. This is probably the most common desktop linux problem after intsall but not once have I ended up with truly unsupported hardware. I can always seem to get it to work.

I hooked up eth0 and ran yum update. Next I need to get the drivers for my wifi card.

I’ll post again in a little while.

I decided to leave a 20GB partition of my HDB to store my wamp folder and work files. I had a few other software configuration issues that would have had me reconfiguring stuff for a few hours to keep my windows software happy.

I love litestep… I’ve been slowly tweaking my minimal theme for years now… a systray and a command box/clock and that’s it! I leave a 2px area at the top of the screen that can always be clicked to access menus.

I’m installing Fedora because it’s easy but real. I grew up on Slackware but I’ve also used my wife’s Ubuntu a lot… Ubuntu is nice but it seems a little bit too user friendly for me. Fedora is a good in between.

Anyway… It’s time to insall linux on my laptop (Toshiba Satellite A135-S4477). I miss the 1337 feeling of linux desktop.

At this point I’m doing drive cleanup. I have a 90GB HDB that I’m going to install on but it was half full. I’m almost done transferring files to my 300GB external drive. This is a bit of a hassle because my WAMP folder is on HDB and I’m going to have to reconfigure the ini files later. Oh well.

Once HDB is clean and I’ve burned my Fedora DVD I’m going to delete the partitions and start the install.

I’ll keep posting about the process.