CentOS: fixing the most annyoing problems

I switched back to CentOS from Fedora 8 because F8 was kind of too heavy for my Dell laptop. After A few hours work, I am finally able to fix the most annoying problems I've had with CentOS, nm-applet asking to unlock keyring and screen failing to light up again after closing the lid. The methods should work as well for earlier versions of Fedora like Fedora 6. For convenience, I also put solutions to some other problems in the end.



Annoyance 1: nm-applet asking to unlock keyring

(If you haven't got your wireless to work, for Intel 2200BG or Intel 2100BG series wireless cards scroll down.)

Fixing the problem for Fedora 8 is somehow more automatic. But here's what you do with CentOS 5.

Download pam_keyring from here. Fc5 rpm worked fine for me.

then as super user (su enter)

gedit /etc/pam.d/gdm

Add the following lines to suitable places.

auth optional pam_keyring.so try_first_pass
session optional pam_keyring.so

The order is crucial for it to work. Here's a copy of my gdm file:

#%PAM-1.0
auth required pam_env.so
auth optional pam_keyring.so try_first_pass
auth include system-auth
account required pam_nologin.so
account include system-auth
password include system-auth
session optional pam_keyinit.so force revoke
session include system-auth
session required pam_loginuid.so
session optional pam_console.so
session optional pam_keyring.so

You're done if your login password is the same as your keyring password.
If not, do "yum -y install gnome-keyring-manager gnome-keyring pam_keyring" log out and run "/usr/libexec/pam-keyring-tool -c" to chance it.



2. When you close the lid and re-open it (on a laptop), the screen doesn't turn back on

su enter

gedit /etc/acpi/events/video.conf

uncomment the last two lines making it look like this:

# Configuration to turn on DPMS again on video activity, needed for some
# laptops. Disabled by default, uncomment if your laptop display stays blank
# after you close and open the lid.

event=video.*
action=/usr/sbin/vbetool dpms on

3. Other problems that should be easy to solve:

3.1 Wireless for Intel 2200BG, 2100BG or 3945BG

Go to http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/index.phpto download your wireless card's firmware. Extract it and copy it to /lib/firmware

Enable networkmanager from system->administration->services and reboot.

Then your wireless network should be ready. Also, because network-manager activates your wireless card automatically for you, I usually choose not to activate them in system->administration->network because it takes extra time.

3.2 Screen resolution for Intel 915GM.

System->administration->display. Choose the intel vendor driver.

3.3 NTFS.
Go to CentOS wiki page on NTFS.

And if you want to tune your CentOS to perform faster, the Fedora tweaks here should all work (and of course some of the services are different, just ignore the ones CentOS doesn't have.).