[ILUG] Laptops & IR support

[John N S Gill]

> 
> > Well, our experience had led us to avoid Dell for anything.  [...]
>

I think we've had 7 machines from Dell with Linux pre-installed. 
They always seem to turn up a week or so after a new RedHat is 
installed.  I've had very few problems, until the latest one.

The latest one was a latitude CPx.  Came with redhat 6.1 on it, so I 
tried to put 6.2 on.  (See earlier posting for the full gory details, 
basically it locked up and I had to wait for the battery to run 
down).

Support for this wasn't made any easier as it was acquired in the US 
so I had to deal with US support.  Well, dell were no help at all, as 
soon as I mentioned Linux it was off to linuxcare, dell just weren't 
interested (ok so they set up the linuxcare support, but you do run 
the risk of being bounced between the two).   Linuxcare generally 
only covers whatever version was installed originally, although I 
have found them co-operative over this.

In fact, Linuxcare have been pretty helpful on the whole.  This time
it took a while for them to respond (my first incident report, disappeared
from their database).  Eventually got an e-mail from someone pretty 
helpful.  They couldn't actually solve the problem (to be fair they 
don't really support 6.2 yet), but I was at least able to get a full 
list of all the Dell specific mods that had been made to the machine 
and an assurance that these would become part of the official 
releases eventually.  

Reassured, I took copies of the Dell stuff and had another go.  Since 
the video driver was one of the things they supplied I went for a 
text mode install + it worked.  Then I just had to put the Dell files 
back in place.