The Dell comes equiped with IRDA, bluetooth, USB, firewire IEEE1394.
Firewire
Works right out of the box. No need for any configuration or some such. Tested with an external hard disk
USB
Tested with a standard usb laptop mouse. Plug it in, done, you can use it.
IRDA
Not tested yet (and probably won’t get tested at all because the only IRDA device is my cellphone which I might sync with the laptop. But for this I also do have a standard serial cable that is way easier to use.)
Bluetooth
Using my new bluetooth capable cell phone bluetooth worked right out of the box. No need to do some extensive configuration. But make shure that the following packages are installed:
bluez-utils bluez-pan bluez-pin bluez-libs bluez-hcidump bluez-sdp
A good tutorial is available here
For file transfer and handling of bluetooth devices I use the kde bluetooth framework which works quite well.