In my case the victim was the battery. First its capacity got drastically reduced to about 30% of the original capacity and then it completely refused to work. Good that batteries can be replaced

All this sounds pretty bad. Fortunately there is an easy way to prevent this problem.

Fedora 9 includes a tool called cpuspeed which can react to increasing system temperature and throttle down the CPU. cpuspeed is included in the default installation but it needs to be configured before it can prevent thermal damage to the laptop. The configuration is quite simple:

1. Download cpuspeed configuration file and save it as /etc/sysconfig/cpuspeed.
2. Adjust the saved file to match your system – especially options MAX_SPEED and MIN_SPEED.
3. Make sure cpuspeed daemon is configured to start automatically when system boots: /sbin/chkconfig cpuspeed on
4. Restart cpuspeed daemon: service cpuspeed restart

That’s it – I’ve been running my laptop with this configuration for a few months already and the CPU gets throttled down whenever the system gets hot.

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It turns out the OS needs some help before it will automatically use the native mode. The modifications are limited to xorg.conf file.

First make sure DDC is NOT disabled in xorg.conf (/etc/X11/xorg.conf); this would be indicated by the line:

        Option      "DDC" "false"


make sure the above line is NOT present or comment it out.

Then add this section:

Section "Monitor"
        Identifier     "FUS L22W-7SD"
        Option         "DPMS" "true"
        Option         "PreferredMode" "1680x1050"
        Option         "RightOf" "LVDS"
EndSection


Finally look in the file for:

Section "Screen"


and within add this line:

        Option "monitor-VGA" "FUS L22W-7SD"


After that restart X server (in Fedora 9 it’s enough to logout).
Now you can enjoy the 1680×1050 resolution!

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What I used to do was to keep a copy of all the relevant files as they were in the previous version and then modify the new installation accordingly. This solution was working for me but I was never sure whether the new configuration was exactly the same and if I hadn’t missed any settings in one of the configuration files.

A few days ago I found a better way to monitor the configuration files for changes. As long as you install all the software as RPMs (which makes sense anyway since it’s easier to deploy the same package on multiple machines or deal with reinstallation) you can use the rpm verification capability which is built into the rpm command.

The way this works is quite simple. For example, I want to know if I changed my firewall settings. Since the firewall I’m using is installed as part of the iptables RPM I need to execute (as root):

# rpm -V iptables

which produces the following output:

SM5....T c /etc/sysconfig/iptables-config

This means that since the RPM was installed the file /etc/sysconfig/iptables-config has changed. Specifically the output indicates that the following has changed:

• size of the file (S),
• permissions (M),
• MD5 checksum (5),
• modification time (T).

The properties which did not change are:

• device major/minor numbers (1st dot), if it did change we would see D
• path to which a symbolic link points to (2nd dot), if it did change we would see L
• user ownership (3rd dot), if it did change we would see U
• group ownership (4th dot), if it did change we would see G

Now I know that only this file from iptables RPM was modified.

If I want to look for all the changes in /etc folder I would execute:

# rpm -Va | grep "\/etc\/"

which produces quite a long output so I won’t list it here. Instead of writing “rpm -V” one can also use “rpmverify”.

RPM verification has a few more uses than just checking for changes you did to your own system. It can also be used to monitor your system for unauthorized changes.

This post was written based on information I have found on Novell website, rpm.org and man page for rpm command.

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