[ale] Suse 9.2 on Dell D600

[Mike Murphy]

I finally got around to loading a linux distro on my laptop (a Dell 
Latitude D600). After hacking about with FC3 and Debian (Sarge), I tried 
the suse 9.2 pro net install cd, and...

Wow! In general, this was the least painful laptop install I've ever 
tried. For the most part, everything has worked out of the box, 
including HW accelleration for the ATI graphics. Some issues (and 
solutions) for the archives, etc. below. If anyone can offer some 
suggestions to my ACPI/Powermanagement questions below, it would be 
appreciated.

- ACPI/Power management: "Hibernate" aka suspend to disk actually works, 
which is refreshing. stand-by and suspend to ram don't though. It'll go 
to sleep, but when it wakes up, no screen output. I haven't figured that 
one out yet. If anyone knows a solution to this problem, it would be 
appreciated. Battery life doesn't seem as good as it is on windows 
(though this is totally subjective, I haven't left it on on the battery 
to run down and timed it yet). I think this is probably tweakable 
somewhere though. I haven't messed with anything more than the Yast 
power management screen yet.

- Wireless: the intel wireless just works. You have to configure that 
adapter in YAST, adding your base station's SSID, etc. and your keys, 
but after that, you're off and running. This is a far cry from the FC3 
experience.

- More wireless: of course, I need to be able to roam a couple of 
networks, and opening yast and changing configuration each time is a 
pain. So, I had Yast install waproamd, which is pretty nifty. It scans 
for known base stations, and connects to them in configurable order of 
preference. Unfortunately, I couldn't get it to connect to my base 
station at home automatically. The solution was to hack the waproamd 
connect script for each essid to replace the file in 
/etc/sysconfig/network for that interface. A total hack, but its worked 
seamlessly.

- VPN: the cisco vpn installer work has available (4.03b) would install, 
but when you try to start the service, it would fail (kernel module 
wrong format). After a bit of tinkering, I was able to get vpnc to work 
with our vpn installation however, and I think it just works a little 
better than the cisco client as it is... It doesn't do key rotation yet 
though. I haven't left the tunnel up long enough yet to see if that's a 
problem.

- Fonts: as usual (at least for me), fonts were an issue. I'm much 
happier now that I've installed the msttfonts patch, however. I always 
feel dirty using MS true type fonts, but darn it, I like Verona!

Now if I could figure out how to get that little "N" off the Gnome menu....

Mike



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Mike Murphy
781 Inman Mews Drive Atlanta GA 30307
Landline: 404-653-1070
Mobile: 404-545-6234
Email: mike at tyderia.net
AIM: mmichael453
ICBM: 33:45:14.0584N  84:21:43.038W
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