Hi Everyone,
I've been using SuSE 9.0 for a while now, but one thing that has greatly annoyed me with the distro is its lack of support for laptops. My biggest problem is that I use my laptop at a number of locations, home, school, and two different jobs. These places have a mixture of ethernet only, wireless and ethernet, and wireless only connections. As far as I can tell, SuSE only attempts to retrieve DNS information for the first device it loads, which for me is eth0. In an environment with a wireless only connection, this is no good. If eth0 cannot find an IP address, wlan0 gets an IP, but no DNS info. The DNS and gateway must remain dynamic, because of the different networks.
Another thread, linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?s=&threadid=160308 mentions this exact problem, and I have been using the solution of ifdown, ifup for some time now. This is getting annoying, and I'm about to create accounts for two other individuals who will not have root access, so this will not be an option for them. Has anyone discovered a method of forcing SuSE to find DNS information for both devices?
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

-Michael

P.S. Does anyone know how to use two pointing devices simultaneously in SuSE?

"but one thing that has greatly annoyed me with the distro is its lack of support for laptops"

My biggest problem, is that part of your post...

Suse has the most laptop support of any commercialy available linux distro. It comes fully patched and enabled for all ACPI features, including dell, toshiba, and compaq specific adjustments to the kernel. It has apm fully compiled and enabled. It has all the available controls and utilities included to adjust screen brightness, tv out, battery life, cpu throttling for various laptop models.

As for the problem of networking being a little single minded and wanting to assign to the first available device, thats just kinda how linux works. A better way to go about things would probably be to either leave the eth0 disabled, or leave both disabled and only enable the one you want to use. A couple of script files would work nice for this. Or just taking the 3 clicks to enter yast networking and turn on what you wanna use works as well.

Now, for the mouse problem.

Plug in both mice. Switch to runlevel 3. Run sax2. It should autodetect both mice. It it doesnt... 1, you have a crappy built in/external mouse that wants to be extreme uber-mouse lord of all and is taking control. And 2, just click on the different tabs in sax till you find the mouse area and add the second mouse manually.