Mark Alford's Fedora 19 GNU/Linux on a Thinkpad T430s

Last modified 2014-Feb-18

My experiences with other thinkpads and older versions of RedHat are available here.

Summary table

Installation Notes

1. Realtek wireless drivers and WPA

   The T430s has a Realtek RTL8188CE wireless controller, but the Linux kernel driver is not adequate: it sometimes suffers from pauses and breaks in connectivity, and Realtek's drivers do not compile with recent kernels. See this bug report and this Fedora Forum thread for example. The Linux kernel driver seems to work better for networks that have no encryption or WEP encryption, so if you have control over your network you can tell it to use WEP.

   A more radical approach is to buy a USB wireless antenna. I tried the Belkin Wireless G USB Adapter (part F5D7050). It works out of the box and performs better than the built-in wireless adapter.

2. On waking from suspend, Logfile explodes

   After waking from suspend, /var/log/messages rapidly fills with messages of the form

   Dec 23 08:13:02 mymachine kernel: [ 7603.407288] mei_me 0000:00:16.0: reset: wrong host start response
   

   until the filesystem is filled and the machine stops working. The fix is to blacklist the mei module,

   cat >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
   blacklist mei_me
   blacklist mei
   

3. Gnome 3: a great reason to switch to Xfce

   The default desktop in Fedora 19 is Gnome 3, a painful step backwards in user-friendliness from Gnome 2. For details of how to use Xfce instead, see my F17/T42 page.

4. emacs cannot cache passphrase

   If you want to edit a symmetrically encrypted file without having to repeatedly enter the passphrase, you would naturally use the the option (setq epa-file-cache-passphrase-for-symmetric-encryption t) in .emacs, but it doesn't work. One workaround (see the EasyPG entry in the emacs wiki) is to make sure gnupg is installed (not just gnupg2) and add the following additional line to .emacs:

   (setenv "GPG_AGENT_INFO" nil)
   

Mark Alford's home page

Roger Alford