It would seem a lot of my issues with this laptop and linux are/were more about figuring out the right combination of kernel to display driver. On the other hand, a close friend and sometimes mentor said he left Fedora a while ago and swears by Debian because of these kinds of inconsistencies that seem to arise. So I dont know. Most likely I'm going to toss an old HDD into it and try FC6 and a different kernel. One thing I can almost promise is that on the Inspiron 8100, FC6 and the 2.6.19 kernel dont play well together with NVidia's legacy device driver. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I tried an older version of the display driver with that kernel and FC5 and it doesn't work. At some point I'll put all this into a table with pretty little checkboxes to keep track of it, but for now, the only thing I know that DOES work on a Dell Inspiron 8100 is the following config:
- Fedora Core 5
- Kernel Version: 2.6.16.21
- NVidia IA32 Driver Version: 1.0.8776
On a side note, the kooldock application that can be installed through the "Add/Remove" programs menu is just about enough eye candy for me when combined with a few other window changes I made. So for now, I'm satisfied with a working laptop that I can develop on. Hopefully within the next year I'll have a new enough laptop that'll run FC6 just fine with the new drivers and wifi! (wifi on this doesn't seem to be within my reach)