Failed to Install CentOS 5.2 on Dell Vostro 1400

Intro
I had some good experience with installing CentOS as a desktop on couple of older machines. Will post the notes from that experience. I decided to go ahead and try the setup on my Dell Vostro 1400.

Not much luck
I ran the network setup and the whole process went smoothly up to the first boot. The laptop did boot and went into the final installation steps (adding user, sound, firewall, etc.). The setup failed to detect sound interface (which was not a problem for Ubuntu 7.10 and 8.04). I went ahead and did the first update.

Brief first impression
There are several things that did not work:

• sound card
• wireless network not recognized
• bluetooth interface (was not sure how to tell it to look for my bluetooth mouse)
• did not try webcam, which I was hoping to test it with gspca driver, but other issues turned me off.

The source of most problems could be the fact that CentOS uses little bit older kernel. Did tried to play with the sound little bit. But most of the solutions posted on web advised loading kernel modules from third party repos. It could be that there was a simple solution, but I did not have much time to troubleshoot.

Conclusion
I pretty much gave up on the sound issue. At this time would not recommend unless you want to play with it. I really love CentOS and the whole concept of having stable distro. It could happen that the chipset on Vostro 1400 is too new for it. I am havin g a pretty good experience with CentOS 5.2 as desktop on a Dell Dimension 3000 (P4 with 512M). Any input on CentOS use on Vostro laptops would be appreciated.