Installation of Linux was simple enough, everything was detected automatically, including the soundcard. There were however four problems that needed tweaking:

1. Soundcard - it can only play back at 48000Hz so be sure to resample where possible. I use arts under KDE which allows fixed resampling. Be sure to set arts as the soundserver to use from the various programs like xmms, xmame, mplayer, etc. You can wrap unsupported programs with artsdsp to force resampling (which I do on epsxe for instance).
2. IDE - the default installation does not and can not use DMA
3. USB Mouse - if the mouse was unplugged it would need to be reset manually before it was recognised again
4. Graphics - were not accelerated

Hard drive/DVD DMA

This was the worst issue. I was getting about 2-3MB/sec speeds from the HDD without DMA so needed to fix it. DVD speed was too slow to play back DVDs after the default install. Finally I fixed it by making and installing a new kernel 2.4.20-rc2-ac1. After installing this kernel, all my problems went away and I was able to enable DMA which made the computer soar.

So in a nutshell download:
linux-2.4.19.tar.gz and patch with
patch-2.4.20-rc2.gz then patch with
patch-2.4.20-rc2-ac1.gz and install.

Then after installing, add the following lines into /etc/rc.d/rc.local:

echo "Starting DMA"
/sbin/hdparm -d 1 /dev/hda > /dev/null
/sbin/hdparm -d 1 /dev/hdc > /dev/null

USB Mouse

I wanted to be able to use both the touchpad and my external mouse at the same time and switch between the two (removing the USB mouse when it was not wanted) at my will without having to reconfigure anything. I did this by putting USB support into the kernel when I compiled it, and then have the following in my /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file:

Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier     "Anaconda Configured"
        Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
        InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
        InputDevice    "Mouse1" "SendCoreEvents"
        InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier  "Mouse0"
        Driver      "mouse"
        Option      "Protocol" "IMPS/2"
        Option      "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
        Option      "ZAxisMapping"  "4 5"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Mouse1"
        Driver          "mouse"
        Option          "Device"                "/dev/mouse"
        Option          "Protocol"              "PS/2"
        Option          "Emulate3Buttons"       "yes"
        Option          "ZAxisMapping"          "4 5"
EndSection

Graphics

It is an NVidia card so I thought I might as well install the accelerated drivers (I have not had too much trouble with them, and they *do* let me play tux racer and PSX emulation so what's a guy to do :)). The drivers can be downloaded from the NVidia website. Instructions are provided there but in a nutshell I have the following in my /etc/X11/XF86Config-4:

Section "Module"
        Load  "dbe"
        Load  "extmod"
        Load "fbdevhw"
        Load  "glx"
        Load  "record"
        Load  "freetype"
        Load  "type1"
EndSection

Section "Device"
        Identifier   "NVIDIA driver (generic)"
        Driver       "nvidia"
        VendorName   "NVIDIA"
        BoardName     "NVIDIA GeForce 2 GO"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier   "Screen0"
        Device       "NVIDIA driver (generic)"
        Monitor      "Monitor0"
        DefaultDepth    16

        Subsection "Display"
                Depth       16
                Modes       "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
        EndSubsection

EndSection

Fuji 6800Zoom camera

This works easily and simply. Just make a /mnt/fuji directory and then mount it using:

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/fuji

'I' button

The little dell information button is keycode 129. You can put this into ~/.Xmodmap if you want to assign something to it, but personally I do not bother as I cant think of anything worthwhile to put on it.

Software

I have loads of non-redhat software on my box, including:

1. espxe - PSX emulation... a laptop that runs PSX games flawlessly :)
2. xmame - Arcade emulation... can not live without it.
3. other emulators - though I do not play these as much (ok maybe zsnes ;))
4. mplayer - my preferred media player
5. ogle - my preferred DVD player (with deCSS)
6. nget - for pillaging entire binary newsgroups

Conclusion

Overall I am pleased with my laptop and it offers me a great range of abilities that windows would not come close to. I have no regrets about being 100% linux and do not miss windows at all. My thanks to the linux kernel mailing list archives and the dell linux laptop group on yahoo for the snippets of information that I compiled to form this document and my laptop configuration.