I have SuSE 10.1 running on a LG T1 Express laptop.. after about two OS installs I figured out how to get my wireless card, sound card, and even bluetooth working. However, for some reason using kb3 or any dvd recording software provided my drive freezes. It won't burn resulting in a three second press to my power button because linux crashes (or something does). now, I can fairly say that if this was a windows problem I would have had it licked in 10 minutes. but I only have so much hair in my head to pull from all the swearing i've done to my computer in the past days...

kb3 and the two programs on it read fine, and recognize the drive perfectly down to the model number (not a big deal I know, but at least it tells me the drive is accessible). it even tells me the media in the drive, ie., dvd-r(rw, ram) or cd-r(cd-rw).. it begins to burn properly, writing the proper data size. but when it comes to finishing the disk all hell breaks loose.

can someone please help? because i already have my quote on the linux side, and I don't want to change it

/boot linux/fall in in love/microsoft who? -please, no making fun of my quote

Just wild guesses on my part:

(1) a buffer somewhere is too small; you might want to increase buffer sizes in k3b configuration.
(2) the packages that you have installed that k3b uses are incompatible with each other.
(3) the cables going to your DVD drive might not be good or not connecting properly.
(4) your computer's hardware might be just a little iffy.
(5) SuSE might simply not be fully compatible with your drive.

Your options are:

(1) try beefing up k3b's configuration and see if that works.
(2) see what packages are installed that k3b needs and if they appear to be the correct ones.
(3) check the DVD drive's cable. You might want to unplug and plug it in a couple of times to wipe away any dust that might be causing a bad connection. While doing that, be sure to ground yourself to the computer's case and keep yourself grounded so that you don't cause any static electricity damage.
(4) Run mprime's torture test for 24 hours and see if it causes any problems to show themselves. mprime is available at http://www.mersenne.org
(5) switch to a different linux distribution. I have found Fedora Core 4 to be rock solid so far and I have no trouble burning my DVDs in k3b.

Eek, windows is famous for these kinds of problems, including all of their ugly intractability that you are currently experiencing. Further, with windows your system might be working fine at first and then, suddenly, a problem like this just appears and won't go away, whereas linux tends to be much more stable regarding this (i.e. once you get linux to work it continues to work). I should know since I have experienced this kind of problem many a time on windows systems. Further, with windows, you don't have option #5 above (switch to a different linux distribution) since there is only one windows distribution (i.e. windows xp).

thank you!! however, how is fedora 4 on wireless cards? and is fedora "newbee" friendly? that's why i got suse, because its just like windows, exept the system configs are like windows 3.1 (more command prompt oriented)...

I'm not sure since I don't use wireless cards. I did just read that FC4 wasn't very friendly regarding that and that was one of the advantages that FC5 (Fedora Core 5) had over FC4, and that FC5 was great regarding setting up wireless on a laptop. But that is only what I read. So, you might want to try FC5 instead of FC4, which is what I use.

Your SuSE also sounds like the FC4 that I have, which suggests a similar experience with FC5. Further, windows is not exactly newbie friendly. It is just that tips about how to setup windows are more pervasive than with linux, something that will hopefully change soon. As an example, setting up networking between my 2 linux computers was actually less involved than it would have been with 2 windows xp computers.