In addition to the ton of other stuff I got done this weekend, I spent a lot of time getting my gadgets up and running. Last night I’ve stayed up way too late futzing with my new Lenovo laptop, for instance, trying to get Red Hat’s Fedora Linux installed on it. Apparently this is something that’s damn near impossible. It’s taken all (and I mean all) of my considerable Linux skills to make any progress with this.

Lenovo apparently took some shortcuts with its laptop firmware which throws Linux for a loop during an installation. Rather than work around it, Red Hat tends to frown on Lenovo’s broken implementation. They do this in spite of Lenovo being, oh, just the world’s largest PC manufacturer whose North America headquarters is, oh, just fifteen miles away from Red Hat’s headquarters. You’d think these two companies could get it together but you’d apparently be smoking something if you did.

My solution involves hacking Fedora’s installer and learning far more about it than I care to know. I’ll post my working solution once I find it. For now, suffice to say that a if a grizzled Linux veteran like me has this much trouble simply getting Linux set up on a new laptop then it’s no wonder most people don’t want to touch it.