On Tue, 31 Oct 2006 at 10:29pm, techlists at comcast.net wrote > I ordered and just received today a new Dell Inspiron 640m laptop (it > also goes by the name E1405). > > Anyone tried installing CentOS on this laptop? It's the wireless drivers > I'm most concerned about; it's got the Dell 1390 internal wireless card > (not the Intel wireless). > > Anyone have some feedback, on the wireless or any other issues, on > running CentOS on this laptop? I've got a Thinkpad Z61t, which is somewhat similar to yours (although I do have the Intel wireless). To be honest, I didn't even try CentOS on it, figuring the hardware was too new. I initially installed FC5, which mostly worked, except for standby mode (it'd go to sleep, but not wake up) and some video issues (vesa worked, i810 required an out-of-band upgrade but even then GL still crashed). Over the weekend I upgraded to FC6, which is actually quite nice. The video works very well now, and standby and resume works (except that I can't quite get wireless working after a resume, but I'm not sure if that's due to lack of trying and/or the complication that I'm also using WPA2). I'm fairly certain that you'll need xorg-7.1 to get video working natively (rather than via vesa), which means FC6 or wait for CentOS5. And to have a hope of standby working I'm pretty sure (bot not positive -- did the AHCI suspend patches go into 2.6.18?) you need the hard drive in "compatibility" mode rather than AHCI. As for your wireless, a little bit of googling seems to indicate that bcm43xx has issues with it, and ndiswrapper is the way to go. Good luck. -- Joshua Baker-LePain Department of Biomedical Engineering Duke University