suse 8.2 networking

[dep]

begin  Matthew Carpenter's  quote:

| Did you ever get these things ironed out?

i got a lot of it ironed out -- apic=off seems to bring joy to many; 
it did me. however, in exchange i cannot get opera -- any opera -- to 
work reliably, and for some reason the printer drivers included in 
suse 8.2 take my printer offline. this is very irritating!

| It turns out that, in the essence of COL, SuSE install cd provides
| many methods of installation, including what they call "Manual",
| which prompts you before loading modules, etc, but is still rather
| user-friendly.  This was the method I had to choose to get it
| installed on the 1850R, along with another well-documented
| procedure to remove the USB load script, as there is something
| broken on the 1850R with regards to USB.

yeah. i wish their manual were *more* manual -- for instance, letting 
the user tell it not to detect hardware.

| I agree with you, SuSE isn't perfect, but it's better than the rest
| at this point.  And their cost/value ratio is outstanding, once
| you're installed :)

unless you want to print or use opera, alas. actually, that's not 
entirely true -- it didn't take the inkjet printer offline. it didn't 
*print* anything with it, but it did pretend to for awhile and then 
eject a piece of paper. the laserjet that is my bread-and-butter, 
though, it sent data to and then took offline and nothing but a power 
cycle would bring it back. still wouldn't print anything even then, 
though.

| Caveats I've found with 8.1 (I'm hoping for improvements for 8.2):
| * Netscape and Mozilla don't work with a JVM: They were compiled
| against a newer glibc than any JVM is compiled for and it doesn't
| work.  Simply download the latest from mozilla.org and it works
| great.

ah, yes. the great "nothing works with 8.1" bug. red hat at least had 
the courtesy, back when it was shipping what it called gcc-2.96, to 
break everything *equally.*<g>

| * Audacity 1.1.3cvs which ships with the 8.1 has a bug recording in
| stereo.

really? a buzzing bug or a chirping one? and how does it sound in 
stereo -- does it move back and forth or anything?<g>

| * MPlayer doesn't do Encrypted DVD's and other "gelded" apps. 
| Simply visit packman.links2linux.de and download the full-featured
| RPMS and dependencies.

that's a legal issue that i do not think will be going away anytime 
soon.

| Fo $80, you can purchase (notice the community support-level
| rising) the Professional version which comes on 5 CD's, a HUGE
| value.  This includes almost all of what you would want to do on a
| Desktop and/or Server.  Their distro is rock solid and mostly
| logical thinking has gone into the creation and testing of this
| 10-year old distro.  And they don't treat you like a Beta tester
| like other well-known distros (which will remain nameless to avoid
| a distro war)

well, i am unimpressed with their support, but otherwise i think your 
evaluation is right. though i do think there is enough stuff broken 
that i intend to wait another two years before upgrading again, once 
it all gets straightened out.

| The FTP-install over the Internet or intranet is also very
| alluring.

8.2 via ftp became available just now.

| If SuSE continues down the road they've been heading, I predict
| SuSE will take over the lead in the distro wars within the next
| 18-24 months.

among mere users, very possibly. overall, doubtful.

| Let me know if I can help troubleshoot with you.  The networking
| thing prompted some questions in my head but I thought I'd check to
| see if you got them straightened out before launching into that
| discussion.

the networking stuff got fixed, but the printer is killing me 
(especially now that there is a linux word processor that i mostly 
*like.*)

thanks!
-- 
dep

http://www.linuxandmain.com -- outside the box, barely within
the envelope, and no animated paperclip anywhere.