Linux on a Latitude D630. The journey

I really like to have the Festival plugin for Pidgin.
I followed these instructions but I had some issues.
Here is the fix I found.

Step 1)

Download the .tar.gz file from the pidgin-festival project.

Step 2)

Untar the archive:

tar zxvf pidgin-festival-VERSION.tar.gz (VERSION can change depending on the version you download)

Step 3)

Run autogen

./autogen.sh

Step 4)

Configure:

./configure

Here is where I got some problems. It complained that the "purple" library package was missing. I realized I had to install the libpurple-devel package. This is what I did:

sudo yum install libpurple-devel

And that fixed that problem. The next issue was that it complained that the "pidgin" package was missing. I had to install pidgin-devel package with:

sudo yum install pidgin-devel

Now I was able to run configure with no issues.

Step 5)

To compile just type 'make':

make

Step 6)

Install it by typing:

sudo make install

Step 7)

If all goes well, you should now restart Pidgin and should be able to see the plugin there.

When I tried to configure the plugin it complained that it could not find any voices in /usr/share/festival/voices. I checked and the folder did not exist. On the other hand the voices could be found at /usr/share/festival/lib/voices so to fix this I did:

cd /usr/share/festival
sudo ln -s lib/voices

And the symlink was created from /usr/share/festival/lib/voices to /usr/share/festival/voices.

Please let me now if you have any issues!

Following this post I was able to install the proper nvidia driver in order to get the desktop effects to work on Fedora 9.

Basically the steps are:

Step 1 - Install the Livna repository
su -
rpm -ivhU http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-9.rpm

Step 2 - Install the Nvidia drivers
yum -y install kmod-nvidia

After this,reboot your X server.

This should be it, except that because I was using the PAE version of the kernel, I was not able to load the driver.
I you have the same issue, just edit your boot loader and try a no PAE kernel. If you have only 4G of ram like I do, it does not make a difference anyway.

Here is how you can install Lotus Notes client version 8 on Fedora 9.

First thing you need to do is REMOVE xulrunner from the system (using add and remove) because Fedora 9 comes with version 1.9 and LN only runs with version 1.8.
This means you will also have to remove some other packages that depend on it, like Firefox 3 or Eclipse. I'm not sure about Eclipse but after you remove xulrunner, you can then download Firefox 3 directly from www.firefox.com and it will run with no issues (even with xulrunner not installed).

Next step is to install Lotus Notes. Unpack the tar and run the setup as root.
After the installation is completed, you can call LN from Applications -> Office -> Lotus Note 8. You should have no issues.

One thing I did not test yet is the HTML emails. Not sure if those will work.

Feel free to post any problems you found. I'll try to help as possible.

I am very impressed with Fedora 9, although it was a bit complicated to install. But that could have been me making the wrong choices.
So far, everything worked mostly out of the box.
The video card works fine, specially with the official Nvidia driver. I'll post more about this later.
The wireless works fine with open networks.
All usb devices connected so far worked fine (external hard drives, mouse, card reader,etc)
The vpn works fine too.
I think I will stick with this!

My new Latitude D630 has arrived!
As requested, no OS was installed. Well, actually I requested Ubuntu pre-installed, because that way I was sure that all hardware would work on Linux, but Dell informed me that, at least in Europe, you cannot get a Latitude D630 with Linux. So the next option was no OS.
Well, at least it will be a bit more fun! :)

When I turned it on, this beautiful message showed up "No operating system is currently installed on this computer.". Aaaahhhh....

The choice for this installation (for several reasons) is Fedora 9. Here it goes!!!