Garyng: PCMCIA has a WiFi Intel [wirelles] card and a winmodem PCTEL 2304WT, not too sure which is exactly Slot 1. Both are currently unsupported [at least not without tweakening]

Aay: Yes, i got to know that the WiFi part of Centrino is unsupported, the rest (Pentium M, etc) is OK. I already contacted Intel & urged them to folow up on their pre-release promise as to render the driver open source/provide Linux support. Yet to receive an answer.
Yes it seems backward compatible quite well, the HD install boots with no problem, seems to partially ignore the PCMCIA hardware?