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My Huawei E169 used to be working fine with Linux NetworkManager under Fedora Core 10 until a recent yum upgrade. The NetworkManager now waits for some time (about 30 seconds) before it gives an error message on timeout. After some troubleshooting, the following files /etc/ppp/chap-secrets and /etc/ppp/pap-secrets need to have some changes in their permissions settings.

$> chmod 0660 /etc/ppp/chap-secrets /etc/ppp/pap-secrets

That solves the problem, and now I can access the Internet via my SingTel 3G network.

If you find that your Gnome or KDE desktop feels laggy (i.e. the screen takes a while to redraw when you are switching between windows) even when there is no significant hard disk activity or CPU load, you might want to modify your xorg.conf to enable EXA.

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I have gotten my wireless LAN on my Asus eeePC 1000h working on Linux fedora core 9 distro. The following records the steps that I have performed to get the RaLink wireless device working. You should be comfortable in editing files and running commands via terminal shell.

Update: Fedora Core 11 has support for this wireless device.

1. rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm
2. yum install kmod-rt2860
3. Reboot your eeePC.

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I have tried overriding my resolv.conf nameservers with OpenDNS on Fedora Core 9 so that the domain names get resolved faster.

1. Ensure that your network is able to get a dynamic IP from your ISP’s dhcp server.
2. Locate your dhclient configuration for your interface. For my machine, the file is /etc/dhclient-eth0.conf.
3. Then add the following 2 lines to this configuration file.

prepend domain-name-servers 208.67.222.222;
prepend domain-name-servers 208.67.220.220;

Now restarting your NetworkManager, and you should see that the OpenDNS nameservers are prepended before your ISP’s nameservers.

It’s actually a straight-forward process and is good for users who are lazy to download multi-GB images for a one-time installation procedure.

1. Go to Fedora web site and download netinst.iso for your machine architecture. For i386, the filename should be Fedora-9-i386-netinst.iso
2. Burn this iso to a CD/DVD. Note that this is an image file. After burning, you should see folders like isolinux, etc on your CD. If you still see an iso file on your CD, that means you have not burnt the image correctly.
3. Now boot up your machine using the CD/DVD. Select the first option on the menu.
4. Then continue the setup process until you are prompted with the location of your installation media. Choose URL.
5. You will be prompted to setup your network devices. Enter the settings according to your network environment.
6. When prompted for the location of your repository, you need to enter the URL of an online repository which contains the individual RPMs. It is not the same as the Fedora image mirrors which contain only the iso images. For me, I use http://mirror.hiwaay.net/pub/fedora/linux/releases/9/Fedora/i386/os
   If you enter a wrong URL for the repository, you need to restart the setup process. Somehow, there is a bug in the installer which prevents me from correcting any error in the URL at the later stages.
7. Continue with your disk drive partitioning. If your repository URL is correct, you will prompted to select your package groups: office and productivity, development and web servers. From then on, the setup process will be similar to a CD/DVD-based installation.