At the beginning of this week, I received a copy of SuSE 8.0 Pro and attempted to install it on a Thinkpad 600e with about 300 Mbytes of memory. Installation was in a new 1.8 Gbyte partition. Network access is via a Cabletron (Wavelan) 802.11 card. There is absolutely nothing remarkable about this machine; it's a vanilla Thinkpad 600e.
Towards the end of a default install I get the message
Checking for PCMCIA (using i82365) -- running
which is all she wrote. I was able to ^c out of this after waiting 15 minutes to see if anything interesting was going to happen. There's was a lot of chatter in the logs about PCMCIA problems.
Sooo, I tried going to the SuSE website to "unlock" my support key. After filling out the appropriate form, which included my email address, I was informed that ai.mit.edu was not a valid domain name, which I'm sure will come as a shock to the folks at the MIT AI Lab.
Failing that, I tried calling the SuSE tech support number, which is not a toll-free number, of course. After the usual canned messages and clicking, I was informed that everybody was busy and told to call back later. No voicemail.
So, I sent an email to their tech support address. This was three days ago. I got some machine responses, but have yet to hear from a human being.
Yesterday, I called back the phone number and succeeded in getting somebody on the phone, a cheerful Irish fellow. He told me that they had, indeed, experienced problems setting up these cards and offered to email me some info that he thought would help. He asked for my email address, which I gave him. He told me I'd have the email in 20 minutes. Over 24 hours later, I'm still waiting.
In addition to the above, I can also observe that KDE 3.0 takes FOREVER to come up on login. I think it takes about as long to login to the SuSE 8.0/KDE 3.0 system as it does to login to W2000, which is pretty bad. SuSE claims to support GNOME. Don't believe it. After observing the performance problem with KDE, I redid the install, choosing GNOME instead. Their version is unbelievably minimal.
I can also say that after perusing the system logs myself, I decided that the PCMCIA hangup was probably an IRQ or some-such conflict with the sound stuff. So, I redid the install without sound support and this time the PCMCIA stuff didn't hang. But the card is not set up and there's nothing in the installation to help with card configuration. Apparently they expect you to know how to edit the config files yourself, despite the fact that you are paying these guys to make installation easy and despite there being nothing in the documentation about how to do this (there is a content-free paragraph in the *Reference manual* on page 339 about such cards that says "More detailed information about PCMCIA can be found in the *Reference Manual*"! Emphasis mine, obviously. What a joke.
All this in contrast to my experience with RedHat 7.1, which installed easily on the same Thinkpad and also on the desktop machine I'm typing at now. I had intended to install SuSE on the latter, but wanted to use the laptop as a test-case. No way in hell am I going to proceed now with SuSE on the desktop machine. I guess I'll chalk this up to experience and go back to RedHat./Don Allen
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At the beginning of this week, I received a copy of SuSE 8.0 Pro and attempted to install it on a Thinkpad 600e with about 300 Mbytes of memory. Installation was in a new 1.8 Gbyte partition. Network access is via a Cabletron (Wavelan) 802.11 card. There is absolutely nothing remarkable about this machine; it's a vanilla Thinkpad 600e. Towards the end of a default install I get the message Checking for PCMCIA (using i82365) -- running which is all she wrote. I was able to ^c out of this after waiting 15 minutes to see if anything interesting was going to happen. There's was a lot of chatter in the logs about PCMCIA problems. Sooo, I tried going to the SuSE website to "unlock" my support key. After filling out the appropriate form, which included my email address, I was informed that ai.mit.edu was not a valid domain name, which I'm sure will come as a shock to the folks at the MIT AI Lab. Failing that, I tried calling the SuSE tech support number, which is not a toll-free number, of course. After the usual canned messages and clicking, I was informed that everybody was busy and told to call back later. No voicemail. So, I sent an email to their tech support address. This was three days ago. I got some machine responses, but have yet to hear from a human being. Yesterday, I called back the phone number and succeeded in getting somebody on the phone, a cheerful Irish fellow. He told me that they had, indeed, experienced problems setting up these cards and offered to email me some info that he thought would help. He asked for my email address, which I gave him. He told me I'd have the email in 20 minutes. Over 24 hours later, I'm still waiting. In addition to the above, I can also observe that KDE 3.0 takes FOREVER to come up on login. I think it takes about as long to login to the SuSE 8.0/KDE 3.0 system as it does to login to W2000, which is pretty bad. SuSE claims to support GNOME. Don't believe it. After observing the performance problem with KDE, I redid the install, choosing GNOME instead. Their version is unbelievably minimal. I can also say that after perusing the system logs myself, I decided that the PCMCIA hangup was probably an IRQ or some-such conflict with the sound stuff. So, I redid the install without sound support and this time the PCMCIA stuff didn't hang. But the card is not set up and there's nothing in the installation to help with card configuration. Apparently they expect you to know how to edit the config files yourself, despite the fact that you are paying these guys to make installation easy and despite there being nothing in the documentation about how to do this (there is a content-free paragraph in the *Reference manual* on page 339 about such cards that says "More detailed information about PCMCIA can be found in the *Reference Manual*"! Emphasis mine, obviously. What a joke. All this in contrast to my experience with RedHat 7.1, which installed easily on the same Thinkpad and also on the desktop machine I'm typing at now. I had intended to install SuSE on the latter, but wanted to use the laptop as a test-case. No way in hell am I going to proceed now with SuSE on the desktop machine. I guess I'll chalk this up to experience and go back to RedHat. /Don Allen