[Nottingham][OT] Laptop Advice

[Michael Leuty]

On 21/07/05, Joshua Lock <incandescant at gmail.com> wrote:
> I took an Ubuntu live CD into PCWorld and it all worked great.

That was a brilliant idea from Richard. So obvious, in retrospect.

Meanwhile, I had been struggling for a long time to get some version
of Linux installed on my daughter's laptop (ThinkPad R31, several
years old now). Most distros were plagued by the demented
multiple-clicking mouse cursor problem, and I had great difficulty
getting the wifi card to work. Fedora, Ubuntu and Mandriva all let me
down.

So I tried SUSE 9.3 (an impulse buy in PC World). What an unexpected
pleasure! The wifi card works beautifully with the ACX100 packages
downloaded from SUSE, and the DMMC problem was cured with a kernel
boot option I found on www.susewiki.org.

I had been fine with Fedora Core from 1 through to 3, but my
experience with Fedora Core 4 made me realise that it is experiment
software. I came across three significant bugs. A partitioning problem
when installing on /dev/hdb, reported to Bugzilla and problem said to
be repaired in rawhide, I managed to work round it. The infamous
display bug with Matrox cards, workround available (use FC3 xorg rpms)
but bug not yet fixed. And Palm won't connect, no workround, not fixed
yet.

So (for the time being at least) I am a very happy SUSE convert.

-- 
Michael Leuty
Nottingham, UK