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Managed to configure wireless LAN with SUSE

hs123 — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 14:22:05 GMT

Today I finally managed to get WLAN to work through SUSE Linux with my HP nx6110 laptop. Although the WLAN controller was detected earlier, it didn't work until I installed the Windows driver from the manufacturer's CD using ndiswrapper.

Not sure which one did the trick - the default kernel device driver for the chipset or the ndiswrapper driver, but it works now so that's all that matters.

Completed 2 years at LQ! A note of thanks.

hs123 — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 02:06:56 GMT

I just noticed that I had completed two years at LQ recently (2 years 5 days as of today).

It's been a long journey since I first installed a magazine distro based on RedHat 6.1 to now when I multi-boot 4 distros on my machine (Debian, Gentoo, Arch and Suse) and I have a laptop with Suse as well. Linux has become second nature now. I hardly ever use Windows at all.

I've also made a lot of friends on this forums, had a few flame wars here and there, picked up a few fights :p and also had some good learning moments, especially with relation to hardware and kernel modules/device drivers.

I just wanted to post to say thanks to LQ and all its supportive members who've made this a great site and a learning experience for all of us.

Happy holidays to one and all! :)

SUSE - the ideal laptop distro

hs123 — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 02:57:25 GMT

SUSE Linux is probably the most ideal distro for a laptop. I recently acquired a HP nx6110 laptop and I installed SuSE without a problem. As I had mentioned in my SuSE 10 review at LQ recently SUSE is quite a polished professional distro.

I was impressed by the way SuSE autodetected most of the settings required for a laptop including power management as well as USB device auto-detection. SuSE was minimal fuss and the post-install configuration was limited to merely setting the system date and time and a few locale-specific settings.

Ideal for a laptop where you probably need to get it up and running without many issues and you don't have an internet connection to do the installation.

We forget that Linux can be frustrating sometimes

hs123 — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 15:32:01 GMT

I have always criticized people who complain about Linux on forums and while I do think that some of them do troll for the sake of trolling, I think I can relate to some of the sufferings of other Linux users which I think we tend to forget once we smooth over all the configuration of the system and get it to work the way we want it.

I recently changed my ISP from a cable provider to a DSL one. Getting it to work has taken me a long time, not because Linux could not get it to work, but because I had a difficult time figuring out how to configure the connection to work properly with the router.

To cut a long story short, it was to do with how to get the IP assigned to the router. Doing it manually did not work at all and while I was able to establish the connection, I could not do anything at all. It was frustrating. Because to get help, I needed to connect to the internet, but then I could not connect at all in the first place. It is a catch-22 situation. Finally I had to manually run pppoe and then establish the connection. It sounds trivial and it probably is, but then the sequence wasn't too obvious in the first place.

I think that I have some idea now why there are so many frustrated newbies. Certainly not trying to justify trolling, but I think I can understand why there are so many of those "why can't Linux be easier?" messages.