I have successfully installed Fedora Core 3 on an IBM A21m laptop. I managed to get my SMC2635SW wireless card working with the driver provided at aluminum.sourmilk.net/adm8211. Initially I was running kernel-2.6.9-1.667 with applicable ADM8211 driver. After driver install I was able to configure the card via the GUI of system-config-network 1.3.22. When I ran the app after initial install I selected the 3com 3c501 as the installed hardware because my card wasn't listed, I wanted to see what would happen. The app appeared to have had no problems configuring the card. Upon reboot the card was initialized, received an IP, ran flawlessly. I fired up the net config GUI again to find that the app had changed the configured harware listed to SMC Ultra32 EISA. I was fine with that, everything still seemed to be working.

I was having issues w/ACPI causing the machine to freeze on shutdown with a message something like 'acpi=power off' yet the machine wouldn't power down all the way. The easiest possible solution seemed to be updating the kernel which I did via yum. That worked fine, updated to kernel-2.6.10-1.770_FC3. The power down freeze was solved, now I needed to insmod the updated driver for my card which I prepared before rebooting to the new kernel. That worked fine also. Except for........

When I reboot the driver isn't loaded, has to be done maually. I know there is a way to accomplish this automatically but I've yet to find clear enough instructions that have worked/applicable to my installation. I wanted to use the system-config-network GUI app to do this but no matter what hardware I selected it wouldn't work. A quick solution for me was to remove the 3c501.ko from /lib/modules/2.6.9-1.667/kernel/drivers/net/ and put the adm8211.ko in renaming it to 3c501.ko. I know, this is WRONG. But I'm a newbie and this worked for me.

I'd like to know how to do this the RIGHT way. I'd also like to know how to enable the ACPI panel for the Control Center in KDE. ACPI seems to supported on this system yet not configurable via the Control Center.

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't CPU throttling handled in the 2.6 kernel? Why doesn't it seem to working? I'm assuming that it's not because of the really bad battery life I get when booted into FC3 vs. XP.

Thanks for listening to my rambling, I appreciate any help & understanding that I am a proud