Fedora FC5 gripes

I have a Sony Vaio laptop that I was trying to get running with Fedora FC5, but I have had nothing but issues. First, it would install ok, but then booting up it wouldn't get past "udev" before freezing. I discovered that adding the boot parameter acpi=off or pci=routeirq would boot up, but once booted, my built in wireless card didn't work and my pcmcia cards wouldn't work well. My older 802.11 kept going up and down and up and down. The Cardbus card "is not supported".

Some research showed that my wireless card (ipw2200) needed firmware updates of various kinds so I updated everything. Still, nothing successful. Using "Live" CD's, Knoppix didn't work, but the old Ubuntu did - so that was interesting. Finally, I went back to the boot parameters and took out the boot parameters that I added, and it booted up fine and started working.

My second gripe is Nvidia. I had to install from Nvidia's site additional drivers so I can see my video properly. Geesh - I didn't realize that a video driver had to be proprietary. Release it into the wild - please. It's a pain to have to download and configure the damn thing. Let the distributions do it automatically.

I may have to take a look at this new Ubuntu distribution since the old version of the live CD seemed pretty nice.