fedora on dell vostro 1510?

[Andrew Parker]

On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 4:06 PM, Matt Domsch <Matt_Domsch at dell.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 12:56:09PM -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> >   as a followup to an earlier post, i'm interested in finding an
> > entry-level laptop who's most important property is that it have a
> > full WUXGA (1920x1200) display, preferably non-NVIDIA video, and runs
> > fedora reliably.
>
> May I recommend the Dell Studio 15 instead of the Vostro you were
> looking at?  It is available with Ubuntu pre-installed, and has an
> Intel video and WXUGA screen available.
>
> http://dell.com/ubuntu
>
> Since it runs Ubuntu, it'll run Fedora quite well also.

That may not always be the case.  I bought an Inspiron 1420 from Dell
last year with Ubuntu pre-installed and working.  I put Fedora on it,
and it had all sorts of problems: no DVD, wired or wireless networking
or audio.

To be fair, the version of Ubuntu that it came with had been *heavily*
doctored to get it to work, there were all sorts of pre-release
patches installed.  Later versions of those patches wouldn't always
work, which made updating my Fedora install awkward.

DVD, audio and wired networking worked with the next version of Fedora
though.  WiFi was extremly spotty with NetworkManager, but worked OK
when manually configured with iwconfig, although that rapidly gets
old.

Everything works like a charm nowadays though.

I'm not saying don't buy one, in fact I would still recommend one to
the right person.  Its just that I was bitten by the assumption that
Fedora should just work.  On the plus side, it should have hardware
that is supported, even if drivers are currently under early
development for it.