HI everybody, I've received my copy of SuSE 9.1 and I've gotten it installed on my laptop. Here are my thoughts so far. 0) SuSE 9.1 comes on 2 double-sided DVDs and 5 CDs. There are 64 and 32-bit versions, so one must used the proper side of the DVD. 1) It took 2 hours to upgrade from SuSE 9.0 to SuSE 9.1 on my 1 GHz Sony Vaio laptop using the DVD. That seemed long to me. 2) It uses the 2.6.4 kernel. One new feature of that kernel caused me some temporary grief since I didn't understand what it was doing. The "subfs" filesystem type is used for removeable media. The user doesn't need to mount any CD or floppy, just put in the medium and reference it with "ls /media/ floppy" or whatever. The operating system figures out that the medium isn't mounted, mounts it, carries out your wish, and then unmounts it. Sometimes, I find this a bit annoying, but perhaps I'm just not yet used to it. 3) The ACPI power management on my laptop now actually works! Well, it works for the root user, anyway (kpowersave). I actually got about 45 minutes on a battery (instead of 10). The PCMCIA wireless card really suck the life out of the battery when used! I'm diving into the code to figure out why kpowersave won't work for J-random-user. There's probably some executable that needs setuid root or some such. I suspect I can be more agressive about power saving to get close to 60 minutes out of it. 4) I said "bye-bye" to the ide-scsi module, especially after reading some notes about Linus' opinion of that module and the author of cdrecord. Things work fine without it. 5) Sound works great after one simple command. 6) I got wireless, grub, the printer, the hard wired network, and even (I think) the onboard modem working very easily. I've never had the onboard modem working previously. 7) The network devices are a little weird in 2.6. There isn't an "ifup eth0" or "ifup eth1" like there used to be. On my system, its "ifup eth-id-00:00:00:00:00:00" (fill in your MAC address). Once its up and you see it with ifconfig, the "standard" ifdown command works as always. 8) SuSE 9.1 comes with KDE 3.2.1, with which I haven't yet played. Thunderstorm coming....singing of for now....... -- Andy Stewart, Founder Worcester Linux Users' Group Worcester, MA USA http://www.wlug.org
7) The network devices are a little weird in 2.6. There isn't an "ifup eth0" or "ifup eth1" like there used to be. On my system, its "ifup eth-id-00:00:00:00:00:00" (fill in your MAC address). Once its up and you see it with ifconfig, the "standard" ifdown command works as always.
While I'm not 100% familiar with SuSE, does your network interface appear if you do an 'ifconfig -a' before an ifup is issued? I think its a SuSE thing, not a 2.6 thing your seeing, maybe because SuSE doesn't load the network card module until an 'ifup' is done? -mike
participants (2)
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Andy Stewart
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mike@beakerware.net