Talk:SuSE-Installation
From Grokdoc
I've had the same problem. No PCMCIA card support at all.
I use WLAN cards (PCMCIA and PCI) with SuSE-Distributions very often without problems.
Things that did NOT work (for me):
- use drivers that come with SuSE
- use YaST to configure wireless cards
Things that DID work (for me):
- Don't forget to use YaST to start Card services (or you won't have any PCMCIA-support at all, not only WLAN-Problems)
- Download drivers from Maintainer's site
THIS is a good place to start
- Use the easy scripts that come with those drivers
- Use YaST to install Wireless Utilities (for easy GUI-based configuration)
- enjoy!
Things that I didn't try:
- USB Adapters
Pls. contact me directly if I can do more: eugen(at)drnet.at
Suse Installation Issues
Some years ago I got a book on Linux and a cd with an old version of Slackware on it and tried to install something-anything. I don't remember exactly what happened, but it wasn't much. It was bad enough that I threw it all away and never touch it again for about 5 years or so, when I got a copy of Red Hat when you could still download the ISO's for free and install it. Getting broadband was instrumental in getting me to try a version of Linux again. I didn't find much useful, but at least I did get it to boot, but never got X-Windows running, so had no idea what to do next. Then I got a version of Suse and it installed very well and booted right into X-Windows, found my network, and thus the internet. I figured out how to use OpenOffice and Yast and Sax2, etc., and since have installed 9.1 Professional and got everything to work - on a desktop. On a laptop, I have had problems with the display wanting to reconfigure itself each time I boot, even though it is set up correctly, and wireless network cards 802.11b. After hours of trying to get the Microsoft 802.11b card to work, which is supposed to work with the standard prism drivers for the (b) card, although I hear they use Broadcom for the (g) cards, I gave up, put my Linksys WCF12 for my iPaq into a pcmcia adapter and got it working as root, but never as myself. I have to reconfigure it for infrastructure every time I reboot and reset all the encryption. But I can make it work well enough to see that wireless on the latest, slickest distro out there, Suse 9.1, is still a work very much in progress.
I search the web and the Suse site for help with any issue I run into, and sometimes I find what I am looking for. RPM Bone is a wonderful site, and as long as I install the version for my particular version of Suse I don't often have a problem with it. Suse's Yast does a great job of getting everything up to date.
On the other hand, when it doesn't work "out of the box," the strangeness of the dialogues, the appears of 4 or 5 different tools to perform a particular task, some or all of them which seem to not do anything, or not do it correctly, the lack of "plug and playness," or, put another way, the failure of hardware vendors to build drivers for Linux, or Suse to build driver for it's distro is a huge problem.
It's not as though I didn't pay for a full OS - Suse Professional 9.1 is almost $100 - and well worth it, by the way. But until there are drivers and hardware that communicate with each other and the OS in the way that Microsoft has gotten vendors to do (in other words, Plug and Playness), I can't switch to Suse for good. There are simply to many hardwares and softwares that won't work, and it takes me way to long to fix something when it "breaks."
However, of my 4 machines, 1 is a dual-boot laptop, and 1 is an XP desktop and one is a Suse desktop, and 1 is an XP laptop. I try to stay in Suse as much as possible, but just can't do it full time yet.
At work I still have to support 2000.
