You need to have at least 2 free primary partitions, one for /boot and the other for LV group to hold / and its subdirectories
The biggest surprise is that the wireless card works right out of the box without having to deal with madwifi or ndiswrapper.
HOWEVER, you need to disable NetworkManager ("chkconfig NetworkManager off") AND enable network ("chkconfig NetworkManager on") services as incredulous as it sounds. Even if network devices are not managed by NetworkManager, it runs interference. All the blogs and forums said this and I couldn't believe it but they were right.
-after disabling NetworkManager, you must run "service network restart" to actually start the service for this machine instance and all the devices will be re/booted
-configure/activate your network device via "system-config-network"
-or activate your network connection via "system-control-network"
-unfortunately, you'll just have to use "iwlist scan" to see all the wireless networks but once you do, just add them to System -> Preferences -> Network Connections
UPDATE: the steps in #3 don't always work so the following manual steps work. But even then, sometimes one needs to manually delete the leases files in /var/lib/dhclient
1. ifconfig wlan0 up
2. iwconfig wlan0 essid NETWORK_ID
3. dhclient wlan0
64bit flash player v10 from Adobe needs to be installed in /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins