Fedora has great documentation. It's one of the many reasons that the Red Hat-sponsored community project's operating system is a compelling choice for your desktops, laptops and maybe even servers if you like to tinker.

The Power Management Guide caught my attention, and I used this part of the docs to install Tuned.

I'm not unhappy with the battery life of my HP Pavilion g6-2210us laptop. I get a whole lot more out of it than I did my previous Lenovo G555. But I'm always on the lookout for more optimization, and right now I'm focusing on the hard drive, which throws off more heat than I'd like (but not so much as to be a problem).

I installed tuned and made it run at startup.

There is an error in the F19 Power Management Guide in how to do that.

The correct command (run with rootly privileges) to make tuned start at boot is:

# systemctl enable tuned

The last two words are reversed in the docs. And yes, I did file a bug.

Call it a reality check.

After installs of Debian Wheezy, an unsuccessful upgrade to Sid, and more installs -- Ubuntu 12.04 and 13.10 -- plus some Debian Sid-derived live-disc tests (Siduction, Aptosid), I've decided that Fedora is where I should be right now.

Probably due to my hardware being so new and Debian Stable being so relatively old, my idea about returning to Debian didn't work out as well as I could have hoped.

And then I had trouble with X in Siduction and Aptosid.

Onward, upward. Ubuntu 12.04 wouldn't boot after install, probably also due to its age relative to my HP Pavilion g6-2210us.

Ubuntu 13.04 with the proprietary fglrx driver ran well enough that I still have it on the test drive, a separate 320 MB disk that I swapped into the laptop.

But Unity isn't for me, and I don't see much of an advantage at this point in Ubuntu GNOME 13.10 vs. Fedora 19 with GNOME and Xfce, which is what I'm running once again.

I found GNOME 3.4 in Debian Wheezy much more responsive than GNOME 3.8 in Fedora 19, but the other problems with graphics I had in Debian canceled out that speed improvement.

And the way I have it set up, Xfce 4.10 in Fedora is probably the best desktop environment I've ever used. And I do still have GNOME 3.8 to test when I wish.

I continue to use the proprietary AMD Catalyst driver from RPM Fusion, just as I continually hope for the eventual return of working suspend/resume to this laptop.

That's all I'm really missing.

And the pace of Fedora, which makes even Debian Sid look extremely conservative, offers the best chance of getting there as quickly as possible.

And as I've said before, for all of its forward thinking and new kernels, Fedora 18 and 19 have been remarkably trouble free.

For new hardware, especially when using UEFI, extra especially when dual-booting with Windows 8, I recommend Fedora without reservation.

Amid all the talk about the Steam gaming platform coming to Linux, and more specifically Ubuntu, I just learned that Steam is waiting to enter the RPM Fusion repository for Fedora GNU/Linux users.

I thought you could take care of turning off suspend when the laptop lid is shut under GNOME 3 by using GNOME Tweak Tool. That doesn't work.

Automatic suspend when the lid is closed doesn't work for me because suspend/resume doesn't function on my HP hardware, and I'd like to close the damn lid every once in awhile without having to do a hard boot afterward.

It's the little things.

So I dug in a bit and found out in the Fedora Forum what you have to do (thanks to forum poster jvroig):

In a terminal:

su -
cd /etc/systemd/
gedit logind.conf

Once you're in logind.conf, uncomment (i.e. remove the #) on this line:

#HandleLidSwitch=suspend

Then change "suspend" to "lock"

It should now read like this:

HandleLidSwitch=lock

Save and close the logind.conf file.

Once you reboot, closing the lid should lock the screen and not suspend the laptop.

Note: Xfce doesn't suffer from the same inability as GNOME 3 to control what happens when you close the laptop lid.

Alternate instructions if you want to use vi and sudo:

Open a terminal and type:

$ sudo vi /etc/systemd/logind.conf

Change this line:

#HandleLidSwitch=suspend

to this (remove #, replace suspend with lock):

HandleLidSwitch=lock

Save and close the file in vi, then reboot.

As much as I love Debian, I have had less trouble running Fedora 18 and 19 than Debian Wheezy, video issues notwithstanding (as those are affecting me across all platforms).

Part of this, no doubt, may be due to improvements in Xfce 4.10 (the default in Fedora 19) over version 4.8 (in Debian Wheezy).

But overall Fedora's stability is remarkable, especially because it has a reputation for being less so.

I was reading today about how the Korora spin on Fedora includes Handbrake, the popular cross-platform video transcoding/DVD-ripping utility.

But I am running regular Fedora 19, albeit with proprietary-package assistance from RPM Fusion and a few other repositories.

Still, Handbrake isn't in any of those repos.

So I searched and found HandBrake for Fedora GNU/Linux on Sourceforge.

The installation from the RPM was quick, and now I have Handbrake.

In a very much related matter, Korora looks like a great way to get Fedora with all the multimedia bits set up for you. The distribution's What's Inside page discusses what Korora adds to Fedora in a sort of roundabout way.

Aside from automatic installation of all the multimedia codecs and outside repositories, Korora includes the Jockey proprietary driver manager, which I could really use given all the trouble I've been having with my AMD APU's video component.

This is the problem I'm having, except it's in Fedora, not Slackware:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/no-dev-sr0-dvd-cdrom-detected-after-resume-from-suspension-4175452609/

Basically, I have no problem with the optical drive during normal operation. But once I suspend and then resume, it's gone.

Here is the output of cd-drive:

[steven@shr ~]$ cd-drive
cd-drive version 0.90 x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu
Copyright (c) 2003, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2011, 2012 R. Bernstein
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.
There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
No loaded CD-ROM device accessible.
Drivers available...
  GNU/Linux ioctl and MMC driver     
  cdrdao (TOC) disk image driver     
  bin/cuesheet disk image driver     
  Nero NRG disk image driver

If anybody has any ideas on how to "resurrect" the DVD drive after a resume, I'm ready to try 'em.

I could be imagining this, but from what I can tell with my very scientific method, aka "feeling around the CPU fan," my laptop appears to be running much cooler under Fedora 19 than it did with F18.

For those keeping score, this is Fedora 19 with Xfce on an HP Pavilion g6-2210us with the AMD A4-4300M APU.

In an equally unscientific assessment, the hard drive seems no cooler than in F18.

But a cooler CPU/APU? I'll take it.

I'm now running Fedora 19, but this happened when I was still running Fedora 18 with UEFI on my HP Pavilion g6-2210us.

The Fedora installation created an entry in the laptop's EFI boot menu for Fedora 18. But when I disconnected the hard drive, replaced it with another for some testing, then reconnected the original drive, Fedora was no longer in the EFI menu.

I was still able to boot Fedora by navigating to it via the "boot from EFI file" function in the UEFI menu, so I knew where the bodies (i.e. Fedora's EFI partition) were buried.

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(Click the image for a full-size look at my admittedly vanilla Fedora 19 Xfce desktop)

Update: A preliminary test revealed that my fedup problems were networking-related. I'll try again with my home network tonight.

Further update: My home network was amenable to fedup. It wasn't pretty; the fedup process needs work. But it did work, and not only do I have a working Fedora 19 installation, I now have the AMD Catalyst 13.6 beta video driver via RPM Fusion, and my 3D acceleration problems with my new AMD APU have been solved.

Even further update: With the AMD Catalyst 13.6 beta video driver from RPM Fusion, I'm lacking the small lines on either side of my application windows, but I do have 3D acceleration, and -- more importantly -- for the first time in Linux on this laptop, I now have working suspend/resume, which you'll have to pry from my cold, dead hands.

A still further update: This bug report appears to address the lack of those small lines on the sides of windows.

Here I begin.

After a shaky start with Fedora's fedup update tool to bring my Fedora 18 with Xfce system to Fedora 19, I did manage to successfully upgrade my HP Pavilion g6-2210us (with AMD A4-4300M APU, which features AMD Radeon HD 7420G graphics).

After a curl error on my work network, I started the process on my much slower home network, quickly bypassed the error and started on the slow process of downloading 1,800+ packages.

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