Fedora 12 on new laptop

I finally managed to install Fedora 12 on my new laptop. It dual boots into Fedora 12 and Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit.

Laptop specs:
Toshiba Satellite A505-S6040
Intel i7 720QM
6GB RAM
Nvidia GT330M with 1GB VRAM

The main problems installing Fedora 12 were the installation itself, USB, wireless and video. Let's tackle one at a time.

The first problem is with installing. Video is a problem, so I had to choose the installation option to install with a basic video driver. The next problem was with USB, could't get it to work, so I ended up having to use the touchpad instead of a USB mouse. But that should see you through the installation from a DVD.

To solve the USB problem, after installing, I added the following to the kernel parameters (in /etc/grub/grub.conf):
acpi=noirq

For wireless, Fedora 12 doesn't support Realtek RTL8191 (the wireless for the laptop), so I downloaded the Linux driver from Realtek (as of today, the latest is the one for RTL8192SE). Then all I needed to do was to (as superuser) make and make install (after uncompressing the tarball). However, everytime you have a new kernel, you will need to redo this until kernel support for the RTL8191 is in place.

Last was Nvidia video. I followed the instructions here to install the proprietary drivers. But that was not enough. The system kept hanging. I searched the forums and found that I need to add the following line under the Device section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf:
Option "UseEvents" "False"

There are some other good tips on installing Fedora 12 that you can find here.

So now I am back to being a Linux user!

By the way, these instructions should work for most Toshiba A505-S60XX especially since they share common hardware. Good luck!

Edit: For computers with Intel processors having more than 3GB of RAM, you will need to add "iommu=soft" to the kernel options to prevent X11 from hanging.