One thing to keep in mind is that when John was over, we actually did get both the laptop screen and the Viewsonic working with an Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 live CD. We did not finish in the attempt to get Fedora 13 to do the same thing, but I saved all the logs and libraries and drivers to my server while Lucid was running.
In situations like this, my predilection would be to: (1) buy another hard disk, and put Lucid on it, present from that, or, (2) tweak X and drivers until Fedora matches Lucid, or, (3) copy the presentation to another machine that just happens to work Note that the later Thinkpads keep their hard drives in swappable caddies, and that SATA drive interfaces are reasonably well designed to handle quite a few insert/remove cycles. Some thinkpads are large enough to contain "media bays" - you can swap out the DVD drive for a second hard drive bay. I use these to make "dd" copies of my hard drive onto an identical spare before trips, and this saved my (vegan) bacon on one out-of-town presentation. With a spare caddy and drive, John can have both an optimized Ubuntu disk and an optimized Fedora disk. With two spare caddies and drives, he can have image backups, the easiest way to do a 5 minute restore in case of failure. And with a swap bay, he can pull critical files off the failing drive - they rarely go all at once. Note also that when dealing with software such as drivers, the latest version is not always the best version. If the person in charge of the software doesn't have the same setup as you, they may break something while fixing something else. So if you find something that works, copy it. If you want to help with development, start tweaking things one at a time back towards the not-working setup and see what is making it break. Then provide a detailed report to the developer. Even though I am a Red Hat fanboy and run the Fedora-like RHEL5, I usually present from a Ubuntu laptop, because I have had more luck with driver compatability. Red Hat is a server-oriented distro, while Ubuntu is a desktop/newbie/works-out-of-the-box distro. Thus, Ubuntu may be hard to tweak for edgy stuff like multiprocessor CAD or scientific computing, but is a lot more likely to work for display-oriented do-it-the-common-way tasks. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
