Welcome and current status

[Andy Burns]

Phil Knirsch wrote:

> I've just wanted to say welcome to everyone who joined the mailinglist 
> in the last few days after the annoucement that i'd be starting to work 
> on improving Fedora Core and laptops.

I joined the list a few months ago, and it's been so quiet I'd almost 
forgotten about it, hopefully the publicity will ramp up the volume a 
bit ;-)

I have run Fedora from FC1 through to FC6T1 on a Dell D800 laptop, with 
gradual improvements each time, e.g. LCD resolution, WiFi without 
building my own kernel, NTFS with the help of other repos rather than 
rebuilding my own kernel.

I like the new battery information and charge/power graphs in the latest 
Gnome power manager, helps to show where the juice goes.

Suspend/Hibernate/Resume is still an issue for me, it quite surprises me 
that this is the default when running on battery, as it means closing 
the lid is guaranteed to crash the laptop when it tries to resume.

Bluetooth with the Dell inbuilt transceiver works, but I had to manually 
do a

# hidd --search

to use my bluetooth mouse, the gnome bluetooth manager would detect it 
but not make a connection, not tried bluetooth GPRS connection to phone, 
but I presume that's straightforward.

I use the machine in various configurations depending where it is in use
	a) undocked with internal LCD
	b) docked with only external LCD
	c) docked with internal *and* external LCDs

it would be nice to have on-the-fly screen detection, which I gather is 
on the cards with FC6, though my initial experiments with using DDC have 
been mixed so far, I can manage using ctrl-alt-plus/minus to manually 
switch resolutions.

I think the only hardware that's not supported by linux on the machine 
is the Texas Instruments smartcard reader,

I've been running xen kernels too, semi-pointelss for me at the moment, 
as I don't need multiple linux instances on a laptop, but I'll probably 
upgrade the laptop to one with T2700 dual core to get VT and allow 
concurrent XP + Linux, instead of dual-booting.