opensuse 10.2 + pcmcia wifi + udev
 

I have been running Fedora Core 6 on my laptops for a while and have recently been experimenting with opensuse 10.2.

1. A few weeks ago (1/2007), a udev patch (I think) for FC6 allowed my laptops to boot for the first time with their orinoco wifi cards inserted. I am told this was a udev workaround to a kernel bug. Opensuse still locks up while attempting to boot with a card installed. In both 10.2 and FC, inserting a card after boot has always "worked" (but see #2 below.) Is anyone aware of a 10.2 workaround to this problem?

2. I boot to runlevel 3, then "startx" into a gnome environment, at which time I insert the wifi card. After about 50 attempts, I seem to be only successful in getting wifi to work about 10% of the time without "fiddling" with 10.2 (always works with FC6). I have 4 different wifi cards (all of which I've configured in 10.2, but of course I only use one at once) plus a built-in ethernet card. I have tried both "ifup" and "network manager" methods. Even when the cards work, about 10% of the time I get a little desktop icon with signal strengh bars, and 90% of the time I don't. Basically some combination of "service network retstart" and inserting/removing the cards and running yast to reconfigure the cards usually gets the installed card going, although usually two "restart" attempts are necessary to get dhcp to fill in resolv.conf (for some reason the cards get an IP address from the server, but 2 tries are necessary to get dns server addresses in the file.)

I am not intending to complain about 10.2 vs. FC6, but I am less familiar with it and would appreciate any info as to whether anyone has had any similar 10.2 problems and what setup seems to work best. The hardware seems not to be an issue since wifi is at least basically working in FC6.

Thanks

I hate to enguage in Redhat bashing, but suse was never meant for the linux new commer. I Should no from revious ill exprences with 9.0 and trying to run a samba server which went south quick.

So please dou your self a favor and go the debian route and opt for a disdtirbution like Ubuntu or Mepis.

My business requirements so far have been all redhat/fedora and suse, so that's what mandates the choice. I have not done much suse until the past month, so that's why I'm trying to work with it. It may well be that ubuntu etc. is preferable but I haven't run into any demand for it so far.