Scientific Linux 6 on a S10-3

July 16 2011

I have installed Scientific Linux 6 on my Lenovo S10-3 netbook and everything works, albeit with some effort. Some issues I had:

Updating the kernel causes the system to crash at boot time. The workaround is to use an older kernel that doesn't crash; right now I'm using OpenVZ's older 2.6.32-042test008 kernel.
The Broadcom wifi driver needs to be downloaded and installed from Broadcom's web site. I'm using a file called hybrid-portsrc_x86_64-v5_100_82_38.tar.gz. One gotcha is to make sure there are no spaces anywhere in the path to this file or it won't compile. Networking is actually better in Linux than in Windows.
Some S10-3 computers have an Atheros wifi card instead of a Broadcom one; this card also has Linux-compatible drivers.
Setting the screen brightness requires an incantation like setpci -s 00:02.0 F4.B=ff (full brightness) or setpci -s 00:02.0 F4.B=80 (half brightness).
The 32-bit static Skype client works on the 64-bit kernel after installing all of the 32-bit compatibility libs.
The system doesn't come with mp3 codecs, because of the patent issues.

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