[ale] Re: Suse 9.2 on Dell D600

[Mike Murphy]

Forgot what ate up most of my time yesterday: touchpad:

Out of the box on Suse 9.2 the touchpad works for moving the mouse 
curser around, the buttons and the nipple work too, and tap works to 
send mouse 1 movements. Unfortunately, verticle scrool did not work.

To get that working, I downloaded the synaptics driver from:
http://web.telia.com/~u89404340/touchpad/ and followed the instructions. 
The D600 actually has an alps touchpad, which is also supported by this 
driver, though the configuration is a lot different (there is a 
readme.ALPS included in the tarball that's a lot of help). Now, my 
vertical scroll works as expected.

I'm giving a couple of weeks, just in case, before I nuke the windows 
half of this disk, but thus far, all looks very well. I threatened to 
load linux on my wife's HP at dinner last night, and the response was 
not favorable, unfortunately. Some things probably aren't worth sleeping 
on the couch...

Mike


Mike Murphy wrote:
> 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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