I am generally very happy with Centos 6.2 as an OS for the little Lenovo Ideapad. Everything seems to work, I even have a virtual machine to run FC16 running on top of it.
A net-book that is powerful enough to run virtual machines? Yep!
I also tried to make a virtual machine to try to get the Windows 7 that was the native OS originally. I sized everything down a bit but in particular made a 'Compaq diagnostics' type partition to hold the recovery copy of Winows 7 that I had previously used with great success to restore Windows to the machine after the first foray with Fedora Core 16. In the case of the 'bare metal' restore there was the magic reset button on the machine to press. I guessed that making the special partition bootable in the virtual machine would have the same effect. I tried but just got a frozen screen with not even the hint that anything was going on.
The licence that came with Windows 7 indicated that running under a virtual machine was permitted but without any practical path being apparent to remove its role as the primary OS. Oh well, looks like the only thing I will every be able to do with the copy of Windows I have paid for is to restore it to the PC when I finally come to sell it. I would hope by that time however most people will have come to realise how much better a PC is when running Linux so the need to restore a by then out of date Windows OS should not even arise.
The only gripe that I have with CentOS 6.2 is that it steadfastly refuses to work with my 3G modem stick. I have a MF112 stick from Three that works flawlessly with every version of Mint and Ubuntu I have tried and even an old Fedora 14. The modem is seen but the connection collapses with a -110 error. Very annoying.
As a little experiment I put a Fedora Core 16 kernel onto the system as an extra boot option. It works (mostly) - in that the 3G modem works (which proves that all the NetworkManager/ModemManager userland side is good in CentOS) but the dratted Wifi does not. There are also some issues with sleep mode not working and SELinux wanting to scan the whole filesystem upon ny return to CentOS just in case the alien kernel had been up to anything naughty! These issues may be resolveable by going further down the 'Frankenstien' route than just having alien kernel images and modules but I did not really want to end up with an unmaintainable mess!
In spite of the rough edges being able to take a kernel from a newer distribution and being able to demonstrate that particular behaviours are only to do with the kernel version - 3G working, Wifi not, means that the bugs can be reported to their respective kernel maintainers.
In both directions the bugs are annoying. As I mentioned my 3G modem works just fine in Fedora 14 which is a couple of years old now. The support code for it should have made it into CentOS 6.2 surely?
The particular WiFi hardware that the Ideapad uses not working with the latest Fedora and Ubuntu releases is even more worrying as it represents a regression failure. That is to say a feature that was working suddenly breaks just because a new release of software has come out. Regression errors make us look bad. Unless the hardware concerned is truly archaic there really is no excuse for hardware to work in one kernel release and break in the next.
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