Installing drivers and other Open Suse 10.3 questions...
 

Hi guys.

I'm going to be building a new system in the coming weeks and I want to install Suse 10.3 on it. If it works well then I will be building one for a friend of mine and installing Open Suse 10.3.

As it stands at the moment though, when I build a pc I get motherboard and graphics drivers on a disc. I'm assuming however that this disc only works with Windows.

My question therefore is, how do I find and install those drivers on a Linux machine?

My machine will have the following specs:

• Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 Motherboard
  Intel Q6600 CPU
  Western Digital Sata 2 750GB HDD
  512 MB 8800GTS Graphics Card
  4 GB Kingston RAM
  20x Asus Light scribe Sata DVD Burner
  2000W 5.1 Channel Speakers
  Antec Sonata 3 case with 650W PSU
  PS/2 Keyboard and mouse

I've never done a clean Linux install from a fresh build before so any advice would be brilliant.

Thanks in advance guys.

Tim.

P.S. Just noticed a special sub-forum for questions just like these (I clicked on the Suse/Novell link in the main forum list to get here the first time). If the Mods could please move it to the appropriate spot with my most humble apologies it would be greatly appreciated.

The SUSE disc will normally have all the drivers you'll need and will choose and install them automatically. The exceptions are that only some wireless cards are supported straight away (the majority of others can be installed afterwards, difficulty depends on the card), and you'll have to install the NVIDIA packages yourself to get 3D graphics support, though NVIDIA driver installation is automatic once the right RPMs are installed - see http://www.softwareinreview.com/linu...suse_10.3.html

Thanks for the quick response mate, the info is most helpful.

I noticed from your specs list that you use the Logitec MX3000. How have you found that to work with Linux because that is the keyboard and mouse that I was looking at if I went the wireless route.

The easiest way to install nvidia drivers is to go into YaST2 can click on "Software -> Community Repositories". Then add the NVidia repository. While you are there, select a packman repo to add versions of multimedia packages to enable playing back mp3s and dvd's.

Yeah, this is all great stuff.

At the moment we use the pc for watching movies (both dvd's and torrents etc) and so we want to be able to replicate this on the new machine.

I told the missus that I was chucking Linux on the new box and were her words were, "I don't care as long as I can still do the things I need (read want) to do.

I know that you can do all of this stuff but this is very handy information that you guys are giving me so far, so thank you heaps.

The normal stuff on the Logitech mouse and keyboard work without drivers - keyboard has to be plug and play so that BIOS can see it. The zoom buttons on the top of the mouse aren't recognized (forward and back are). Most but not all of the extra buttons on the keyboard work (volume wheel, play pause, stop, media forward, media back, mute, scroll wheel) once you assign them using xev/xmodmap.

DVD viewing and ripping work fine with mplayer and libdvdcss2 (standard DVDs only, not Blu-ray or HD-DVD yet), no issue with DVD regions. You'll be able to play any MP3, aac, wma, wmv, divx, avi etc. except copy-protected wmv once w32codec-all is installed.