Arch Linux has released 0.8 and has just released another updated iso for Linuxtag.

Previously I haven’t recommended Arch to linux newbies because it required some manual configuration. The new installer auto-detects the majority of things and if you have ever installed a linux distro that required you to do a little thinking (Redhat / Fedora) you may want to give it a shot.

Don’t blow away your primary system though, try it on a virtual machine or something old you have lying around. Its a great distro for old hardware (686 of course, not older than that)

Brian

I have a new laptop and I have put many hours into getting all the little gadgets and gizmos working. From bluetooth and wifi to the CD/DVD drive.

A big problem has been getting the CD/DVD drive to work with Linux. While it worked for the install, somehow the new 2.6.19 linux kernel doesn’t detect it properly. After scouring the internet I finally happed across this thread where many people had the same issue.

The answer there, which also worked for me, is to add acpi=off to the boot line in grub. According to these guys, its actually an issue with grub and the system bios and supposedly if you use LILO you don’t have the problem.

Weirdest problem ever. If you have a Clevo M57U-based notebook (Sager 5760) this post is for you. The only thing that I don’t have working is the built-in camera for which there are no linux drivers currently. I did see projects aimed at creating the driver and since that camera is becoming widely used I assume that we will see one in a few months.

This laptop is a pain to get working but it is nice when it is.

I love mtaskbar but I don’t like window grouping. mtaskbar hasn’t been updated with the new KDE 3.5 grouping flags, so I followed the instructions from here to change the application to not group. This hacks the function up to return false no matter what.

Not very sexy but it solves my problem. If you are interested in the package for Arch Linux I repackaged it and you can Download it here.

Once downloaded run pacman -U mtaskbar-0.7-2.pkg.tar.gz in the directory where you saved the download to update. You’ll then need to remove/add the application back to your kicker.