F10/11 and Intel Integrated Graphics?

[Mike]

I have installed F10 on 8 machines - on 6 of them it was fine and there were no
major issues during install. On those machines Fedora running with a gnome
desktop is excellent (apart from one or two issues with upstream gnome
regressions such as no ability to save desktop sessions!)

However on two machines, one of which is only 3 years old and is a Dell 5150
with 82945G integrated graphics, it was a mess when it came to graphics - and
the other machine was a Dell Dimension 2400 a little older with 82845G graphics
which was also non-trivial to get installed.

I now have them working with quite a lot of effort using the vesa driver rather
than the intel driver. However, despite the fact that I am an experienced Fedora
user/admin, this taxed me a considerable amount and I was ready to throw the
boxes in the bin at one or two points in time. I know there are outstanding bz
reports concerning both these chipsets, and they go back some way before F9
without a proper resolution.

An inexperienced new user to Linux trying an install of F10 to a machine with
either of these chipsets would likely get a very bad impression of Fedora, since
it is easy to end up with a non-functioning screen and keyboard, and the "intel"
driver issue needs to be properly fixed since there must be a non-trivial number
of users who have machines with those graphics chips.

Can someone tell me what the state of development, if any, there is concerning
getting a fixed intel graphics driver (xorg-x11-drv-i810) either as an update
for F10 or fixed in time for F11 release.

I believe that having a new user install an up-to-date version of Fedora from a
DVD or CD set or LiveCD and end up with a blank screen and unresponsive
keyboard/mouse would be very disheartening at best and give a very bad press to
Fedora at worst.

I'd be interested to hear what the general view about this is? F10 is really
excellent when it works but this kind of problem is really serious and should
not be ignored.