I've decided to install Fedora Core 5 on my brand new Dell Latitude D620. Almost everything worked fine out of the box. There are a couple problems with the wireless (resolved), the soundcard (unresolved), and the screen resolution (resolved). If you have any ideas on how to fix them please let me know.

Hardware	Status	Notes
Intel Core Duo T2600 2.16GHz		fc5 - see below
14.1 in Wide Screen WXGA+ LCD		cannot achieve 1440x900 res.(fixed)
1.0GB RAM
Intel Integrated Graphics Media Accelerator 950		fc5
100 GB Hard Drive		fc5 - see below
8X DVD+/-RW		fc5 - see below
Intel 3945 WLAN (802.11a/g)		not supported by fc5 - see below
Sound		broken
USB		fc5

Status:working; broken; not tested. Notes: fc5 - works after install.

I more or less followed the guide from www.stanton-finley.net, which is extremely clear and non-pretentious. I probably know just enough linux to be dangerous, but am by no means an expert, so many of the problems I am having are probably just stupid errors. Feel free to set me straight.

I've set up everything for a dual boot with FC5 and WinXP. Windows works fine. Fedora works mostly fine. Much better than the last time I made a dual boot (RedHat 9.3).

Well, obviously the computer ran just fine when I installed everything on it. I am not quite sure, however, that the architecture is right. Since it's dual core, should it be running i686 or ix86_64? Basically I think its using the 32 bit architecture, but I will need to do benchmarks to see whether there is a speed improvement when running code.

Update: On a tip from www.fzu.cz/~kolorenc/d620/, I used 915resolution 5c 1440 900, and put the modeline

in the "Monitor" Section of the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. Now it works great. Seems like the missing modeline did the trick.

The screen is a 14.1 in wide screen with a native resolution of 1440x900. It works just fine in Windows XP, but I can't get it to work in Fedora. Everything gets stretched. I tried to modify the xorg.conf and change the resolutions but that didnt help. I downloaded the 915resolution script that will let you change the screen mode, but when I run it everything freezes when the xserver starts up. The last 915resolution command I tried (in rc.local) was

but again, that didn't work. Anyone with an answer please let me know.

For the dual boot, I used partition magic to resize my NTFS partition to 50 GB and left 45 GB unallocated. When I installed FC5, I put 40 GB as ext3 and 5 GB as a FAT32 (vfat) data partition to pass things back and forth. I had no problems partitioning and the data partition works fine in linux and windows.

I haven't tried burning or reading DVD's yet, but the device seems to be detected fine and I am assuming it will work.

Getting the wireless to work was somewhat annoying. Here are the steps:

• Download and compile new kernel w/source
• Download and recompile ieee80211 subsystem (ieee80211.sourceforge.net)
• Download and compile the ipw3945 driver (ipw3945.sourceforge.net)
• Put the microcode file in /lib/firmware and the regulatory daemon in /sbin/
• run the daemon on startup via rc.local
• For some reason, it also kept setting the bit-rate to 0 every time on startup, so I had to fix that in the configuration.

Sound not working. Tried to unmute the sound, no change, tried to turn on the amplifier, no change, tried patching, installing lots of things, no change. Any ideas?

Update: Several people have emailed me saying that reinstalling new/updated ALSA drivers works with the d620. Some have even said that updating with yum fixes the problem automatically. I haven't had a chance to try these fixes out, and I can't currently can't afford the time to make the serious mistakes which I surely would, and thus am living without sound.

Other software that I have installed includes the Intel c++ (not quite working) and fortran (works fine) compilers (ia32, academic license) with math kernel library, scilab, GMT, fftw, gvim7.0, and others.