Fedora Core 7 on a Dell Latitude D630 Dual Core
 

I recently installed Fedora Core 7 on a Dell Latitude D630 Dual Core
My harddisk has six partitions:
BOOT (primary)
/ (primary)
/2 (primary)
swap (extended)
/home (extended)
/tmp2 (extended).
Here are the issues I encountered and the workarounds:

Issue #1: Booting from the FC7 DVD x86_64 works, but the installer does not recognize the DVD as a valid installation source.
Workaround #1: I was not able to solve this by fiddling with the boot parameters. Download and install the Ubuntu 7.04 AMD64 alternate CD (the standard CD does not work) in /. Reboot and copy the FC7 DVD to /tmp2 using
mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
dd if=/mnt/cdrom of=/tmp2/fc7.iso.
Reboot from the FC7 DVD in text mode and select the local harddisk partition (in my case /dev/sda7) as the installation source. Install FC7 in / and reboot, followed by
setenforce 0
yum update
and reboot.

Issue #2: The wireless interface is not shown in system-config-network.
Cause #2: The firmware is not installed.
Solution #2: Install the 4965 firmware using
yum install iwl4965-firmware
and reboot. The wireless interface should now be available in system-config-network.
WPA support can be enabled through wpa_supplicant.

Issue #3: After startx the display doesn't look sharp. This is especially noticeable if you are running a VMware (I am using VMware build 6.0.1-55017) Windows virtual machine. Also often the console stays black when you exit X (but you can still access the machine remotely to reboot it).
Cause #3: The intel_drv.so from the xorg-x11-drv-i810 package.
Workaround #3: I could not get the Intel driver from http://www.intellinuxgraphics.com to work. The development driver xorg-x11-drv-2.1.0.1.fc7 improves sharpness, but still often the console stays black when you exit X. Install the i810 driver from FC8 test 3 by downloading it from
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pu...4/os/Packages/ using
rpm -i --force xorg-x11-drv-2.1.1-3.fc8.x86_64.rpm
And despite this is a FC8 driver it seems to run fine in FC7 without problems.

Regards
Gijsbert