Mario Limonciello is a Dell engineer and contributor to Ubuntu. In particular, he's been working on making sure Dell's notebooks and netbooks work with Ubuntu and therefore very recent kernels. He's run into a few fairly annoying problems, and has patches which will be carried in the Ubuntu kernel. He sent them to me, to see if Fedora 12 wants to pick up the same changes, or just wait until they all hit mainline. So I send them here, for your consideration.
1) Handling the rfkill switch on the Dell Mini {9,10,12,10v} and Inspiron 11z netbooks. These enable the wireless drivers to recognize and respond to the value of the physical rfkill switch. Without these, if Fedora is started with the rfkill switch off, the wireless driver loads but can't drive the hardware. Flipping the switch on, the driver can't respond, and wireless remains disabled. Either a manual modprobe -r; modprobe of the wireless driver, or a reboot is necessary for the driver to recognize that the rfkill switch setting is to enable wireless.
http://kernel.ubuntu.com/git?p=ubuntu/ubuntu-karmic.git;a=commit;h=fff16e992... http://kernel.ubuntu.com/git?p=ubuntu/ubuntu-karmic.git;a=commit;h=218f25dbb...
2) bluetooth enable/disable work from mjg. He's pushing a different approach into upstream, but this enables bluetooth + rfkill in 2.6.31ish kernels.
http://kernel.ubuntu.com/git?p=ubuntu/ubuntu-karmic.git;a=commit;h=c1e755f3d... http://kernel.ubuntu.com/git?p=ubuntu/ubuntu-karmic.git;a=commit;h=d83364096... http://kernel.ubuntu.com/git?p=ubuntu/ubuntu-karmic.git;a=commit;h=09c730053... http://kernel.ubuntu.com/git?p=ubuntu/ubuntu-karmic.git;a=commit;h=e6cc51d2e...
3) load the dell-wmi driver on all Dell laptops. This is a bit of a hack, as it causes the dell-wmi driver to load, even on laptops where it isn't necessary. However, 2.6.31 lacks the ability to selectively enable WMI hotkey messaging, and loading the driver on laptops where it isn't necessary does nothing (except take a bit of memory). WMI hotkeys are necessary on a growing number of laptops as they are the only method to indicate a keypress for some keys.
http://kernel.ubuntu.com/git?p=ubuntu/ubuntu-karmic.git;a=commit;h=a532d8d0f...
Thanks, Matt
kernel@lists.fedoraproject.org