Fedora Installation :: GNOME 3 Support For Intel Graphics Chips And Nomodest

[A word of explanation: initially the post below followed a post by Adam Williamson in another thread devoted to inability to load GNOME 3 in VM; this is why I address Adam in the opening.]

Adam, the situation with the GNOME 3 support for Intel integrated graphics seems to be a little confusing. You are probably among the most competent to clarify it.

Let me tell my own story first.

I was installing earlier today Fedora 15 on an HP dm4-1160US laptop with i5 and Intel graphics, and the anaconda installer hung right after "Waiting for hardware to initialize..." flashed on the screen, before even Media Check screen was reached. I tried a few times, always with the sae result: anaconda hung. Then I decided to add nomodeset to the boot parameters and the anaconda installer went on and I was able to complete the installation without a slightest problem.

I rebooted and without a problem reached the GDM login screen. When logging into GNOME, a pop-up window informed me that the system was unable to load GNOME and that instead I would be logged into the fall back mode. By the way, I haven't experienced the problems that plagued "Classic GNOME" on another laptop of mine where instead of clean install I preupgraded from Fedora 14 (strictly following the guidelines for preupgrading).

Wireless card was recognized and wlan initialized, nearby wireless networks seen, yet I wasn't able to connect to my own wireless network (I tried to do this already in the process of installation, equally unsuccessfully).

I was able to connect via Ethernet cable, and then I proceeded to perform yum update.

The update brought a new kernel. I went into grub.conf and noticed that nomodeset has been automatically added to the boot parameters for each of the two kernels. I decided to perform an experiment: I removed nomodeset from the boot options for the new kernel, and left it in place for the anaconda installed kernel.

I rebooted into the new kernel. Right after the grub menu disappeared, the screen turned pitch black and stayed this way for good 10 seconds. I thought that the former situation repeats itself making impossible to boot without the nomodeset option. Suddenly, the screen lit up and the GDM login screen appeared.

I logged into a shiny GNOME 3 where I am writing these words right now. Ah, and I was also able to connect to the wireless (I made yet another attempt using the network manager applet -- this time it worked).

What does that seem to indicate? That GNOME 3 support is already available for Intel graphics chips? But one may need to play with the nomodeset cheatcode, as I described this above?