On Sun, 21 Dec 2008, Hugo van der Kooij wrote:
Alain PORTAL wrote:
So, I need to rebuild many things if I want to use centos on my laptop, and I want to use it!
Getting Centos to support all the weird hardware in my laptop was too much trouble with Centos. So the laptop runs Fedora. But all other systems run Centos 4 or 5.
I have a very recent laptop (Thinkpad X200s) and I noticed that Red Hat backports video drivers from newer Xorg versions to the one they ship. So even if web-pages say you need at least version Y, it is possible that you can still make it work with version X.
You also have the possibility to make it work in VESA or framebuffer mode until the support is added in the future. For a list of things that are coming up in CentOS 5.3, see:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/rhelv5-announce/2008-October/msg00000.html
As an example all websites say that my very recent wireless card (IWL AGN5300) is only supported by kernel 2.6.26+, but in the upcoming CentOS 5.3 it works on a 2.6.18-210.el5 or newer kernel thanks to the efforts of Red Hat.
My built-in camera requires the uvcvideo driver which is also part of 2.6.24+, while Red Hat backported the driver to the 2.6.18-210.el5 or newer kernel.
What I can say is that CentOS 5.3 (due in roughly 2 months) will have a lot of new driver support for recent hardware. And you can already test the upcoming kernels from:
http://people.redhat.com/dzickus/el5/
Also, if you have Red Hat Network access, you can download the RHEL 5.3 Beta Xorg drivers to test your hardware.
You can see my experience installing CentOS 5 on this laptop from the following wiki page:
http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Laptops/Lenovo/Thinkpad-X200s
BTW What video chipset do you have exactly ?
Good luck,