I've just acquired a use IBM Thinkpad R40 model 2722-GDM.
I'm contemplating what to run on it, and longer-term the likely candidates are: Centos 5 SLE{D,S} 10 OpenSUSE 10.2 Kubuntu - the latest. Kubuntu - Long Life (aka 6.04, Dapper, ...)
I've booted Knoppix 4 in it and most seems well, including the Atheros Wireless card Windows can't find.
The major flies in the ointment are the wireless and the inbuilt modem (Agere something). Google tells me the modem can be made to work, and I'm pretty sure from my Acer that the Atheros wifi also work with some minor fiddling: I've build the driver from source.
The problem is, I've done enough fiddling* over the years. I've built enough kernels, attaced enough configuration files with vim, and I want an OS that just works.
I'm sure RHEL 5 will not have a driver for my wireless, and I suspect not for my modem.
Now the point: do the auxilliary CentOS repos have the missing bits so that I can commit to CentOS4 (or even RHEL5 beta) in the short term, knowing that it's a simple upgrade later?
How will CentOS reflect the different RHEL 5 versions? Will it simply merge them into one product, or would one expect to choose different boot media? I ask this because I see SLED doesn't have some of the stuff I want - it's in SLES though, but then SLES doesn't have the madwifi stuff.
* There's fiddling and there's fiddling. I'm getting tired of doing the same fiddling all the time; it's time for new adventures.
Thanks for your time.