suse 8.2 networking

[dep]

begin  Matthew Carpenter's  quote:
| Wow, dep.  You found more problems than I did.  My biggest problem
| with Printing has had to do with setting the Paper size to Letter
| from A4 (which I think was resolved by setting it both in the
| "Driver" settings as well as the "Printer" settings...  Wierd.

yup. the european influence is inescapable, and they sure to 
proselytize for their paper size of choice! 

| I can't say I'm much of an Opera fan either... they say that you
| either love Opera or hate Opera, and if you don't love it, you will
| only ever develop a mild appreciation for it.  Me, I prefer good
| old fashion plays and musicals. :)

careful there -- i spent a year as an opera major. no kidding. (yes, i 
pretty much hate opera, too, but there were many side benefits, in 
that women who choose that major outnumber men who do by about 10:1, 
and of the men, few are heterosexual. it was a candy store. but 
that's another story.)

| I honestly prefer Konqueror as
| a browser, but do find myself occasionally bringing up Mozilla or
| NS4.7 to get compatibility, most often with appliances' web guis
| (Cisco couldn't keep code up to date to save their lives).

i've grown accustomed to the opera browser, and in that i live a 
tragically large part of my life copying and pasting and dealing with 
the ever-moving target that is the desktop clipboard, opera is very 
utilitarian, when it runs, which it used to do no problem. (it does 
have a very annoying "feature": when you view a page with open tags, 
it closes 'em at the end of the paragraph. as a result, when i look 
at something i've put up and i use opera, that missing </a> is not 
apparent to me.

i expect in the coming weeks to do some significant desktop 
reorganization, even moving from kde as my primary desktop. which 
could change *a lot* around here as to browsers and so on. my thought 
is that the switch will be painless, but that is always how it seems 
before hand, isn't it.

| I'm cornfused about the printer drivers, since they are primarily
| from CUPS.  Two other things I found out about Printing in SuSE: 1)
| Make sure you have the right driver.  My HPLJiii Si, which looks
| like a volkswagon and sounds like an F16, prints a very crisp and
| clear picture with the driver approved for the HPiiiSi, and sits
| idle with the HP3Si driver, even thought the Queue somehow empties
| itself. 2) Let Yast2 handle printer config...

the printing subsystem in suse 8.2 is something that entirely 
confounds me, in that yast2 attempts in one module to configure both 
cups and non-cups printers. what's especially flaky about this is, 
well, that it's especially flaky; there ought to be either cups or 
not-cups, and my vote is for the former. the real strangeness comes 
in when the laserjet support is offered only as a non-cups option. my 
understanding of cups, though, is that it intercepts everything sent 
to a printer and does whatever it does to it, so i suspect that what 
i'm sending the printer is grinding through two filters. in cups with 
suse 7.x, yast2 produced a cups configuration that was just plain 
corrupt, and the only answer was to blow it all away and use a 
browser to configure the printer with the cups interface, whereupon 
it worked just fine. but the cups in suse 8.2 appears to be absent a 
laserjet (III, IIID) driver. it's just plain nutty. i'll go after it 
again today, fire-extinguisher close at hand.

| acpi=off lets my laptop handle APM stuff the way I know it should. 
| Otherwise I get a message about some incomplete ACPI implementation
| in the BIOS.  Stupid Compaq :)

acpi is Yet Another Standard Implemented Before It's Ready. the number 
of motherboards that handle it as expected seems to be outnumbered 
considerably by the number that don't, and it can make for a very bad 
day, because the failure modes often give no hint that acpi 
implementation is the culprit. sort of like that delightful five-year 
period when inserting a pcmcia card locked machines hard, no matter 
the operating system.

| It sounds like 8.2 is not the savior of the world.  Oh well, I
| guess there's always 8.3 :)

i think they made some bad default choices for installation, with no 
obvious way of escaping. but, as usual, once the thing is installed 
it's pretty good. i'm not sure 8.3 will do much beyond updating some 
packages; once i have 8.2 the way i want it, i have no intention of 
switching for awhile.

| Write your congressman in support of the DMCRA.  Digital Millenium
| Consumers' Rights Act.  It has specific language (beyond the
| overall return of Reasonable Use detailed throughout it) which
| would allow the use of such technologies to make CSS decoding
| available on Linux in a free form.

here we have a little bit of a problem, because both sides have 
arguments that are sound. we would of course like to be able for some 
reason to watch movies on our computers (not sure why; but i've also 
resisted the temptation to run a cable and use my television as a 
computer screen). and if the windows folks are allowed to do this, we 
should be able to also. otoh, the linux community has gained, fairly 
or unfairly, the reputation of believing that everything in the world 
should belong to them for free and, more, that there is no such thing 
as intellectual property. people who go to some trouble and expense 
to produce things thought of as intellectual property would be 
disinclined to do so if it were decided that they were not entitled 
to the fruits of their labors. the answer, in my estimation, is not 
more legislation, but less. the dmca is not something we should have, 
and other laws aimed at modifying it will simply increase the 
confusion. now, if someone were to propose a legislative session the 
sole purpose of which was repeal, i'd be behind it in a minute. and 
not just dmca, but lots of laws.

| > (especially now that there is a linux word processor that i
| > mostly *like.*)
|
| Really, what's that?

textmaker. released yesterday; we reviewed a release candidate over 
the weekend. it's closed-source, it costs fifty bucks, but it is just 
wonderful; i have a couple of very minor gripes with it, but it 
really is great. loads really fast, has *excellent* word filters, 
integrates with the desktop perfectly, defaults to units of measure 
(and paper sizes) based on your i18n, has just about every feature 
you're likely to want, doesn't try to reinvent the wheel -- finding 
features is easy -- is well-documented, and is really easy to use. i 
think it's not just the best linux word processor ever but *by far* 
the best linux word processor ever. i don't have the release version 
yet, but i'm using the beta for everything. but i'm an exception -- 
i'd rather write than learn how to make an obtuse word protessor 
work. i'm happy for the emacs and latex guys; i understand the pride 
of those who write 1,000-page books in vi; but i have no desire at 
all to join their ranks. writing is difficult enough when everything 
is already on your side.

| About the printer, write me offlist and tell me the details about
| the printer, and what printer filter you can normally get to drive
| your printer correctly with.  If it's lpd's print filter, you can
| still use it.  Printing has come a long ways for Linux... but
| apparently not long enough yet :)

i shall if i can't get it worked out. plan right now is to blow away 
everything yast2 did in the printer realm, see if i can find the 
appropriate cups driver, install it via the cups browser interface, 
and, if it doesn't work, go looking for the unwanted favors suse has 
done for me this time.
-- 
dep

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