Alienware Laptop: no touchpad or keyboard: fedora 2.6.29.4.-167.fc11.i686.pae
 

Hello.
Trying for dual boot. host is windows xp.
After smooth install, the keyboard works to select either Fedora 11 or XP.
When selecting Fedora, I cannot complete the setup since I have no M or KB. Any suggestions?

Use a usb keyboard and mouse.

Thank you for the reply, Simon.
I did try the usb mouse and keyboard, but, alas, they do not work either.
The laptop works fine, otherwise.
As a work around, I installed virtualbox and then fedora 11 on that, and it works slowly but that will have to do for now.

I wonder if it's just that there are no drivers for the KB and M. The question in my mind is how to test that.

The problems will depend on the exact alienware hardware you have.
You probably needed to add some options at install time to make sure all the drivers you needed were in the kernel at boot. kbd and m drivers are not usually a problem, but your computer may have a novel way of installing HIDs which makes detecting them hard. Notice that the install kernel (used by the installer) was able to drive the HIDs - the drivers are there. I'd need to know your exact model though.

The easiest solution is to try different distros - they have different kernel configurations.
Gentoo and Ubuntu seem to get good reports on alienware, and ubuntu has a live disk.