I installed Fedora 11 on the Latitude C400 again after I had finished with all of the hardware upgrades. As I mentioned before the Intel graphics chipset (82830) the laptop has is not very well supported in Fedora 11. I changed the kernel options in order to get the install to work a little better. I played around with Network Manager and had enough issues with it that I decided to look for another solution. I could not get Network Manager to bring up the wireless interface until I logged in. There is an option to always have an interface connected if the network is accessible, but it does not seem to work. There have been many improvements since the last time I tried to use Network Manager, but it still did not quite fit my needs. Someone suggested wicd to me, so I checked it out. It works great with Fedora 11, I got connected to our WPA network without any hassles.
The graphics work okay for the most part. I cannot, however, get xine or mplayer to work without a lot of choppiness. After more research, I discovered that the Intel graphics driver/xorg X server/kernel code is going through a major overhaul. Currently there are a lot of known issues with the driver especially with older chipsets. There has been a few new releases of the Intel driver that have not made their way into the Fedora 11 updates. Some of the updates have made it into Rawhide (Fedora 12 Alpha) so I decided to try to install the Rawhide packages to see if they solved any of my issues. After getting the new packages installed, X did not work at all and I managed to uninstall glibc which was really fun to fix. I tried a complete install of the Fedora 12 Alpha release once it became available. A few things were resolved, but xine and mplayer were still not usable. I also tried installing Fedora 8. Video works much better with it. including xine and mplayer, but I have not been able to get a WPA connection to work with wicd.
At this point I may try a few more things, but since I have limited time, I have a feeling I am just going to end up installing Fedora 12 once it releases and hope most of the video issues have been resolved by then. I am also considering trying Arch Linux. From what I have read about it so far it appears it may be closer to what I am looking for in a distro than what Fedora has become.
Here are some details about what I changed during the install to avoid issues regarding the Intel graphics chipset:
- Add "nomodeset" to the kernel options (I did a PXE install so all I had to do is add the option to the PXE menu configuration)
- Select a text based install via a VNC client from another system
- After all the packagers are done installing, but before rebooting update inittab to be run level 5 and check that the nomodeset kernel option is in grub.conf
