First I would like to say, "Thank You!" to all of the hard working developers and other at CentOS. In spite of some VERY well published delays in getting CentOS 6.0 out the door, it's finally here! I hope to see 6.1 soon.
I am using a more recent Dell E6410 laptop with 4GB RAM, an Intel i7 M620 CPU and dedicated nVidia GT218 [NVS 3100M] video card. WIFI is handled by the Broadcom BCM4314 chipset. Pretty good by current standards. It's the same laptop I have used for my Fedora 13 review.
When I first went to burn the i386 .iso file, k3b greeted me with an interesting, "your image will not fit on your disk" kinda message. I was puzzled and then discovered the issue noted in the CentOS 6.0 release notes about the DVD+R media creation issue. Fair enough, I did not have at the time any other media, so I just overburned past the disk and tried to boot from the media anyway (which worked fine for *my* install). Just don't try to validate the disk ;)
Next, my default DVD install attempt was met with a very disappointing blank/black screen with the onboard Nvidia ??? video card. My good buddy google quickly lead me to some information that either "nomodeset" kernel option or install with the "basic video driver" would be needed. And either of those allowed me to move on through the install.
Reboot after install leads to a rather disappointing 800x600 resolution login screen. At least there is a login screen at all. First a quick <ctrl><alt><f2> key sequence to dump me to console in order to log in as root in order to do a full update and reboot just to see if that will help my screen resolution issue with the *default* install. Darn, still no better resolution! Need to jump to elrepo's kmod-nvidia fast.
Normally, the rpmfusion repository would be my way to get the included BCM4313 with a simple
yum -y install broadcom-wl kmod-wl-`uname -r`
After being told by yum that there was nothing to install, I scratched my head and google'd a bit and found that "Due to an excessively restrictive license accompanying this Broadcom driver, the ELRepo repository developers have refrained from supplying it via an rpm package" according to at least CentOS Broadcom page. Shame on you Broadcom... at least there is a way around the issue based on the instructions on the CentOS page noted! It would be so much easier if Broadcom's legal would just relax.
The bluetooth functions without issue. I could pair with my Droidx in seconds.
Sadly, I don't seem to be able to update the BIOS from the Dell OMSA repository. Initial indications are that they don't care.
Here's the lspci for the laptop:
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor DRAM Controller (rev 02)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor PCI Express x16 Root Port (rev 02)
00:19.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82577LM Gigabit Network Connection (rev 05)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset USB2 Enhanced Host Controller (rev 05)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio (rev 05)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev 05)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 2 (rev 05)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 3 (rev 05)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 4 (rev 05)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset USB2 Enhanced Host Controller (rev 05)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev a5)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 5 Series Chipset LPC Interface Controller (rev 05)
00:1f.2 RAID bus controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 82801 SATA RAID Controller (rev 05)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset SMBus Controller (rev 05)
00:1f.6 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset Thermal Subsystem (rev 05)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GT218 [NVS 3100M] (rev a2)
01:00.1 Audio device: nVidia Corporation High Definition Audio Controller (rev a1)
03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4313 802.11b/g LP-PHY (rev 01)
04:00.0 SD Host controller: Ricoh Co Ltd Device e822 (rev 03)
04:00.4 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd Device e832 (rev 03)
3f:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QuickPath Architecture Generic Non-core Registers (rev 02)
3f:00.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QuickPath Architecture System Address Decoder (rev 02)
3f:02.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QPI Link 0 (rev 02)
3f:02.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QPI Physical 0 (rev 02)
3f:02.2 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Reserved (rev 02)
3f:02.3 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Reserved (rev 02)
Helpful links:
E-Family Reimage “How-To” Guide
E6410 Manuals
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