This is a summary of the installation of OpenSUSE 10.2 on my Toshiba M10 laptop. It also partially applies to a previous installation of SUSE 10.1, which was updated (thus, it is possible that some of this information will not apply to a new installation.) I have also been happily using a Mandrake 9.2 distribution in this system, as explained below.
The system
A nice
Satellite Pro laptop. Sound is particularly good, with harman/kardon
speakers. Specs
from the Toshiba website.
Installation
From the downloaded DVD ISO, which I burned. With the 10.1 I tried the Mini-ISO network way, which works great but it ends up being a bit of a pain with a home, ADSL connection. It makes more sense with a wider band, such as the one at work.
Installation run smoothly, no problems except what follow.
Important notice: recently (Sept 2007) I had to reinstall the system due to the hard disk breaking. For some reason, things were much easier: sound was OK, and I didn't need the "magic line" for the graphic card to work. Still, I leave my comment untouched in case someone runs into the same kind of problems I originally had.
Wireless LAN
This was the main reason for moving from Mandrake 9.2, which run fine including graphics and sound, but did not support wifi. Probably a recent Mandriva distribution would have been fine, but SUSE is the distribution we use at work, and I find it convenient to focus on just one distribution (if I had more time I would play with Ubuntu and others).
It works, thanks to the work of the ipw2100 people, provided the proper packages are installed, specially ipw-firmware. But: just as long as WPA is not used. This can be a security risk, I guess not broadcasting the SSID can improve that (my area is safe in this regard, wealthy neighbours.) Otherwise, the connection goes down and up, not accepting the password any longer. Also, I had to erase the knetworkmanager configuration files (at ~/.kde/share/config) to prevent it from thinking WPA still held.
Graphics
OK, so now I had my wifi sort of running. Unfortunately, the nvidia driver, which had worked with Mandrake 9.2, did not anymore. The pre-compiled packages you can get via YaST do not work either. The screen shows initially black, but for a white line on top. Then it gets foggy, with coloured lines appearing at random. It would make a good screensaver. You will need to execute the NVIDIA... blah blah... .sh file you can download from NVIDIA's web site (due to the .sh extension, firefox saves it as an ascii file, and so does wget; I have found konqueror does the job right.) Be sure to get one file that is not too new, otherwise you will get an error about the libraries not being up-to-date, or something like that. I took one of the December 2006 ones. You'll also need to install the base kernel package in order to compile (the whole kernel, not just the headers.)
After sending a report file to NVIDIA, and a couple of emails back and forth (these people have been immensely helpful, special thanks to Lonni J Friedman), the trick seems to be the following:
install as usual, running the .sh installer (installation via YaST will probably work also, I have not tried)
edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, adding the following line to the Device section:
Option "UseDisplayDevice" "DFP"
Now it looks great, good values of glxgears.
Compiz looks gorgeous. Just used the simple method described in Novell SUSE documentation, using YaST and its sysconfig editor. Some of the plugins do not work, but it's the less important ones: wobbliness, rain...
Sound
This has been quite frustrating, since the feature worked just fine under Mandrake 9.2. I did many things, so I am not quite sure which was the crucial step. The highlights are:
I upgraded the system as much as I could. Some new sound related updates have appeared which might have been important. I am pretty sure the card went from being listed as “AD 1988” (or something like that) to 82801 DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 audio (both are right, Analog devices builds the board and Intel the card, or vice versa perhaps). By the way, I am still confused about the Zen updater and the YOU (YaST Online Update); I think they should be equivalent, but it seems some updates were picked up by Zen and not by the YOU. Anyway, it is always important to add an update source in order to have the system up to date.
Added the following line to /etc/modprobe.d/sound
options snd-intel8x0 ac97_quirk=4
It seems some other values also work. This option seems to be accesible from the YAST sound configuration utility, but I was not convinced so I edited the file by hand. I picked up the suggestion from a page from the Ubuntu distro, a very nice page (quite independent from the particular distribution.)
I fiddled a lot with the kmix buttons. Specially, the “external amplifier” has to be allowed. It also seems the “phone” and “aux” buttons must be switched off. The alsamixer program can probably do this too.
Other features
Supension: does not seem to work. The screen comes back funny again. Then, I have found that it takes about the same time to suspend the system as to shut it down and reboot it later (unlike with Windows X).
DVD is OK.
USB seems to work just fine for removable media.
I have not tried yet:
Infrared
Bluetooth
SD card reader
TV output
external CRC output (this is quite important, for presentations.)
--
Daniel Duque, 26 of December 2006 (Season Greetings!)
daniel (dot) duque (at) uam (dot) es
