The 2.6.19-1.2911 kernel that just got released makes my Dell 640m very happy. It can now sleep (suspend) without any problems and wake up just as well. Marked improvement over the previous kernel, so I’m actually getting laptop mileage out of this.
It still has outstanding issues. The ACPI video driver (video.ko) needs to be unloaded, as it does cause a crash with the Fn+Up Arrow key. External displaying doesn’t work unless the video.ko module is loaded. And volume control is still dead via the hardware keys as well as the Fn combinations.
With the amount of folk actually using Dell’s from the Smolt statistics, I’m surprised that the Dell laptop support isn’t phenomenal. Yes, Fedora has opt-in statistics, which are great, but causing a row on fedora-devel-list recently – I personally don’t see it as wrong, as it is opt-in, and the Ubuntu (with their hardware database) folk do it too, its not something that’s forced. And eventually, this could be useful when it comes to saying “foo laptop is 100% supported” and so on. People like to know these things, and people like to buy things that “just work”.
As more and more people end up buying a laptop, or even a desktop with some snazzy video card, you’d want to know if it just works. I see smolt as being further extended to mine the data, and with a sensible API, a company like Dell could allow you to create custom open source capable machines. I know, thats something I would like dearly. System76 and the rest, will follow suit. I’m surprised this has not already happened.