<<Even though it worked perfectly on my desktop, the free DVD from LinuxPro magazine would not work with my laptop (the drive is OK)---but that's another story>>

I just installed FC8 on my HP Compaq NC-8000. The overall impression is "superb". I had not used Gnome in many moons, and it has gotten VERY polished. (brief pauses while trying to remember how Gnome does things....)

First---the one glitch: Trying to setup the wireless using the network item under administration. It quite simply refused to work with all the combos of settings I could think of. FINALLY, I clicked on the little network icon top right. Lo and behold, it has detected all the hotspots in range. I click on mine, it asks for the WEP key (which I had already entered in the other dialog(, then prompts me to remember this in the "keyring". BINGO--Wireless is now working.

ISSUE: The admin-->>network setup dialog needs to get "in step" with that other control.

The pleasant surprise: Closing the lid actually does what it is supposed to!!!! I can configure it to either blank the screen or to suspend. This is the first distro where I could figure out how to get this working.

Minor annoyance: Seems to be no way to set display gamma without manually editing xorg.conf.

In the words of the marvelous Gilda Radner: "It's always something.." I found several times lately that the latest version of some distro was just about perfect, and then I have tripped across a problem. Here again I had a glitch (with wireless), but it was refreshing to find something working out of the box that has never worked before.

Actually, this is ALL good news.....Mainstream Linux distros are so good, that we are now just "picking the fly specks out of the pepper".

What video card is in the laptop? The proprietary drivers, nvidia and ati, have gamma correction in their control panel. There are other applications that can control gamma like 'xgamma', 'kgamma', and 'displaycalibrator.app'. I found the display presets fine on my intel laptop with ubuntu 7.10 and fedora 8 with no need for manual adjustments.

RV350 (Mobility Radeon 9600) with "radeon" driver.

xgamma works great!!---thanks for the tip.

No problem. Glad to help out.