Hi.
This site is really nice for finding drivers for a particular card. If you do want to buy a new card,I can recommend the zyxel g-102. I just got one for $10,and I had no trouble getting it to work at all. I can't answer your other questions because I don't use suse,sorry. Also,at some point you will probably have to use a terminal,so it's good that you've worked with a cli before. I found that being comfortable with the dos cli helped me in linux.