I strongly suspect that going to the CentosPlus Kernel would be good for my notebook:
Not having NTFS support is making moving files from my XP drive to my Linux drive a pain. Suspend is not working. Rather I suspend and never get out of it! My notebook has an internal SD reader that is not recognized. I notice on boot a message that:
ide2: I/O resource 0x3EE-0x3EE not free. ide2: ports already in use, skipping probe
I suspect this is the SD reader.
When I insert a USB MP3 player with an internal drive and SD drive, only the internal drive is recognized. The SD card drive is ignored.
And so forth.
But http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/centosplus/Readme.txt warns me:
You might want to exclude any packages from the [base] and [updates] section of your /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo file like this:
exclude=php* kernel* postfix*
And I am not sure what to do with this. I have started using yumex on my notebook to 'cherry pick' from CentosPlus (Firebird and Thunderbird) and CentosContrib.