Hi,

I have been trying to get suse 9.2 to run on my inspiron 5160, and so far things seem to be almost working, although i have a few problems:

First of all, i dont seem to be able to do much in terms of shutting down, rebooting, checking battery status, cpu scaling etc. If I try to shut down or reboot then after it has finished shutting down linux it stays at the screen saying "The System Is Down".

Secondly, I dont seem to be able to log in to KDE (i use gnome anyway), as it hangs on the "initialising peripherals" stage, and while this is less of an issue, it is still annoying.

Thirdly, im upto the point where i need to type "dhcpcd wlan0" every time on boot-up for the wireless card to work, and would really like to know why it doesnt seem to connect to the net even though ifconfig shows it has an ip address when in range of the wireless router (i loaded the driver using ndiswrapper then ran iwconfig wlan0, then using yast2 configured the wlan0 card (which i had to add) to use the ndiswrapper driver and use dhcp).

My laptop specs are:
Dell Inspiron 5160 (BIOS update to A07)
3.06Ghz Pentium 4 M w/ HT
512mb ram
60Gb hdd (30 win, 20 lin, extra for swap and the recovery partion)
nVidia Geforce FX Go5200 64mb
DVD-writer
Suse Linux 9.2 Pro and Windows XP Home

ACPI is on? Or Off? I don't really see the question here...

sorry, i haven't turned acpi off myself but it doesn't appear to work, I also mean't to say that it worked using 9.1 personal + ftp, and i switched to 9.2 because its supposed to work better with laptops, and gnome works better with the suse tools such as yast, YOU and SUSEPlugger. I was wondering if anyone could knew what's wrong and/or how to fix it if possible.

Well, usualy when you experience multiple problems, something has gone wrong during install. Try a fresh re-install and then come back if problems persist. Often they just vanish the second time you install things...

Right, I tried a reinstall and I was still having the same problems, but i noticed during boot that powersaved was having an error a few lines just before it loads kdm (so it's still visable if you do Ctrl-Alt-F1), so i went into the yast runlevel editor (in gnome) and enabled acpid. Now it complains on boot that acpid is already running and should have been started by powersaved, although it now boots into KDE, shuts down, reboots, i get the temperature from doing a "powersave -T" and i get a battery reading from kpowersave and "powersave -B". This is a start, although it would be very handy to have powersaved running as i don't think the battery will last very long alone, although its powered most of the time, as the cpu runs at max (3.06 Ghz) all the time. Does anyone know if a better solution?
I now have wireless working again after the reinstall (I'm writing this from KDE using the wireless), but I still have to type "dhcpcd wlan0" as root to get it working, despite this happening at boot:

Setting up network interfaces:
lo
lo IP address: 127.0.0.1/8 done
eth0 device: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401-B0 100Base-TX (rev 02)
eth0 configuration: eth-id-00:11:43:5f:6a:95
eth0 (DHCP) . . . . . no IP address yet... backgrounding.
waiting
wlan0
wlan0 warning: using NO encryption
wlan0 (DHCP) . IP/Netmask: 192.168.2.12 / 255.255.255.0 done
Waiting for mandatory devices: eth-id-00:11:43:5f:6a:95
13 12 11 10 9 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0
eth0 interface could not be set up failed
Setting up service network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .failed

(i don't have my ethernet plugged in)

Has anyone else set up a wireless adapter more successfully in suse 9.2 using ndiswrapper, and if so, how?

I use a wireless adapter in suse with ndiswrapper every day. You follow the ndiswrapper instructions to get your windows driver loaded, then use yast to set up a new network card with ndiswrapper as the module to load... works perfect.

thanks for your reply.

The exact steps i took were

cd /path/to/driver
ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5a.inf
ndiswrapper -l
ndiswrapper -m
then in yast, i made a wireless device with the ndiswrapper driver

something seems slightly wrong, because it gets an ip address at boot but i cannot connect to the network/internet without manually typing in

dhcpcd wlan0

as root
it doesnt seem logical to me :/

"ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5a.inf"!!!!!!!!

I'm using the exact same card.. lol

I just went through a 3 hour hell cause I upgraded the router firmware, finally got it downgraded again so things will work... oy...

Sounds like either you've accidently got the dhcpcd turned off in suse, or that your router/access point isnt set to give an ip through dhcp...

If you are having problems with acpi, cpufreq and stuff perhaps you should go ahead and recompile your kernel (if you think you are up to it). That way you can compile the support right in and not deal with the options ever again.

To check if acpi is on go to the /proc/acpi directory. all available acpi devices will be there. If its empty or doesn't exist then you might have a problem

If you want to check your cpufreq then go to /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq directory. If it exists then cpufreq is on, you just need to change the governor (which is more annoying than I would like for it to be. I just compiled in the powersave governor).

Give us details on how any of that goes.

Thanks for the replies. ACPI works fine now, but i don't have anything in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/. Actually, i have just realised cpufreqd isn't even installed by default (ahhrrrrr...), so I'm going to install it (from the dvd) and see how that goes.
I also do have dhcpcd enabled, and it works fine if i use a wired connection on startup. But the wireless lan doesn't appear to connect unless i type dhcpcd wlan0, even though iwconfig and ifconfig indicate otherwise

Well then you might want to just add it to your startup scripts. Look up how to do that and you should be gold (after a kernel recompile maybe).

Hi, I've now fixed my wireless problem, for some reason it now works after i deleted eth0 from the yast network card config (i VERY rarely use wired networking anyway). For some reason It also appears that cpufreqd doesn't work under an SMP system (i have a P4 M with hyperthreading), but cpufreq does. I can echo values between 0 and 7 to /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/throttling and i can see visable reductions or increases in the speed. I will experiment with getting it to throttle automatically later.

Hi

I've just my powersave working on an Inspiron 5160 using suse 9.2 ( upgraded from 9.1 ).

The segmentation fault error that was appearing in the start up script was coming from the part of rcpowersaved that loaded the kernel cpufreq modules ...

I edited /etc/sysconfig/powersave/cpufreq and set POWERSAVE_CPUFREQD_MODULE="speedstep-centrino".
Normally the script will look for a defined value here or else try to load a list of possible drivers ( where the error was occuring ).

I have the same processor 3.06G P4 and now my powersave starts ok and seems to work fine now.

You ought to post your info at linux-laptop.net -J