My Hardware,
Wipro Little Genious laptop, Model WLG7110.
Intel Celeron M CPU 430 @ 1.73GHz , 1.5 GB RAM, 80GB Fujitsu HDD, 1280×800 wide screen display, Syntek 1.3MP webcam, Intel Pro 3945 wireless, Realtek RTL 8139 NIC, bluetooth, Ricoh 5 in 1 card reader, TSSTCORP CD/DVD RW, Intel ICH7 soundcard etc

Downloaded the CentOS 5.2 DVD .iso using bit-torrent with Vuze.

I already have WinXP installed. So deleted a partition at the end to create a 15GB space.
Just glanced through the Installation guide and thats when i learned about Logical Volume Managements (LVM). Decided to use LVM’s this time. LVM can be resized, moved to another harddisk etc without affecting the OS installed or data residing in it.

I always use the hard drive installation as i am too lazy to burn CD’s.

We need a boot CD or USB to begin the installation program from harddisk. Created a boot USB from the diskboot.img file provided in the .iso using using the dd utility in an another linux system.
dd if=diskboot.img of=/dev/sdb

Reboot and started the installation program from USB.

Chose linux askmethod to use harddrive installation medium and specified the partition containing .iso [/dev/sda5]

Next comes partitioning, this is where we create LVMs
Created a /boot of 100mb type ext3
Created a Volume Group CentOsVG
Created two Logical Volumes, SwapLV 2GB for swap
and RootLV 13GB type ext3 for /

Grub to MBR

Installation done and when i rebooted to the new system, there were a few problems, sound was not properly working [gets muted randomly] and wireless card was not even detected.

Decided to do an update before trying anything to fix them. Setup a wired network and did a system update using yum
yum update

Yum showed 508mb to download and the whole update took 5hrs in my 256kbits/sec line.

Now i have CentOS 5.3 the latest version. This can be checked it by the command
rpm -q centos-release

Sound is perfect after that.

Wireless card is detected but still cant connect. Followed the steps at CentOS wireless how-to wiki to install card’s firmware and enable NetworkManager to use it. There were a problem with NetworkManager asking for keyring password every time, but the solution to it was also in the same wiki.
I was able to use wireless with WPA2 AES with SSID broadcast disabled. More details can be found here.

To Do:
Check the webcam.
Check the card reader. (it is detected)
Check IEEE 1394 port(Firewire)