FC2T3 on Dell Latitude C400 Laptop

[Vibol Hou]

This e-mail was written by me last week and it summarizes a number of 
things that I experienced while installing and using FC2T3 for the first 
time.  I'm sure some things have been mentioned by others so ignore 
those.  The system I have is a Dell Latitude C400 1.2GHz laptop.

Installation was fairly straightforward.  Click, click, click and all
went well.  However, I did encounter a few problems when I started using
the system (Workstation installation, no custom packages).

1. I selected a generic 1024x768 LCD panel during installation.  When X
first started, it asked for resolution and color depth settings.  X only
showed two options for resolution: 640x480 and 800x600.  It appeared
that X was in 1024x768 resolution at the time it asked for these
settings.  Even now, it's in the correct resolution.  However, Display
settings still only shows those two available options.

2. I had some tribulation with the initial networking configuration.  I
didn't know (until I researched it) that 'Mode' can't be set to 'Auto'
for this wireless card (Dell Truemobile 1150 MiniPCI / orinoco) so I
spent a good ten minutes trying to figure out why wireless wasn't working.

3. If an interface is wireless (or pcmcia), checking the 'Activate 
device when computer starts' will fail since pcmcia hasn't been 
activated yet.

4. When adding a new Ethernet device in Network Configuration, it
detects my built in ethernet device as a 3c905C-tx/TX-M tornado card and
also as an Intersil PRISM2 11 Mbps card (both on eth1).

5. When deleting the Intersil PRISM2 card reference, my device at eth1
was also deleted although the device was configured to use the 3c905
hardware entry.

6. I had the hardest time figuring out where the gnome panel applets
were (rtfm?)  Which leads me to ... why doesn't "Start Here" have a
reference to "Help"?

7. Much tribulation using up2date.  Mirrors were too congested, up2date
kept failing so I mirrored one of the repositories to one of my servers
and all was well.  The graphical version of up2date is much worst than
the --nox version when it comes to reporting errors (i.e. "Connection
timed out", etc.) since it just hangs there when up2date errors out quickly.

8. Why doesn't the Add/Remove Packages applet not allow installation of
packages via network?  It only takes CDs ... maybe I'm not rtfm?

9. I installed mozilla-mail because it wasn't installed by default but
it didn't show up in Mozilla's little shortcut bar... till after I
logged off and logged back in.  Maybe there should be some kind of note 
that mentions this after the install?

10. What's with the inconsistency in Copy/Paste shortcuts between
certain applications?  Mozilla does CTRL-C/X/V while Gnome does 
CTRL-SHIFT-C/X/V for the same things.  It took a few seconds to get used 
to, but shouldn't there be some sort of standard?  Just curious :)

That's it so far; I'll continue to report things I experience and I'll 
file bug reports if others experience the same issues.

-Vibol