Just got SUSE 10 up and running, got a problem though

[DarkWolf]

Ignoring for the moment, that the wireless nic isn't working at all... the wired nic is up and running, and even receiving an ip address from my router.

The problem is, that's all that happens. It's got it's IP address, but I can't get out on the internet. I can't even open a browser and go to my router's configuration. Any clues?

It's a Dell Inspiron 9300, with the Broadcom Corporation BCM4401-B0 nic. Found a site for setting up linux on laptops, and for Suse 9.2, with my computer/nic there's a suse online update needed to get it working correctly, but the Suse 10 config says there's no additional steps needed... But based on what's going on, I'm guessing there's got to be something.

I put Fedora Core 4 on there yesterday, to see if it had any better luck with the nic, and it did... sort of. It allowed me onto gaim, but couldn't get out on the internet anywhere. So I'm back to Suse and hoping to figure out wtf is wrong and get it fixed.

[DarkWolf]

What the shit?! Ok... got my wireless working. Just installed the ipw firmware update from Novell, and restarted the dhcp daemon.

Now gonna jack with the wired nic to see if I can figure out what's up with it.

[GT Dan]

do you have a default gateway set?

[DarkWolf]

Yeah, everything's set up right. Like I said, it's getting the IP address, just ... not doing anything from there. It won't even let me get to the router config (but somehow it's able to connect to the router to get an IP?).

Wireless though is working fine. Once I turned off it's power management usage that is. It just decided to shut itself off the last time it was working, and didn't want to come back up, so I disabled the power management on it, and it's been working steady since.

Currently I'm using the wireless anyway, so it's good that it's working. Just weird about the wired not working. But since this is a laptop, wireless is what I'm wanting predominately.

Now I need to get Cedega and Crossover Office going. As it sits, seems like everything is working fine (save for the wired nic, but I'll keep working on it as needed).

[trey85stang]

I always have a bitch of a time getting wireless work on suse, mandrake & fedora.

[DarkWolf]

Wasn't too bad, once the firmware was installed, and power management turned off of it. Of course, it was all by guessing on my part, but turned out alright :) Oh, and I'll need to tweak the firewall as well, right now I've got it off completely, because it looks like it's default settings pretty much block all traffic (which might explain why the wired nic wasn't/isn't working)

The other slight annoyance is it doesn't activate my wireless nic on startup. I have to manually press Fn+F2 (usually twice before the "WiFi" led lights up to tell me the wireless nic is now turned on/active), and another half minute or so for it to pick up in Suse, connect to the router, and be ready to go. Hopefully though, I won't be needing to reboot so much... so this shouldn't really be much of an issue.

The big thing I miss right now though, is the power management. I used to set my computer up to shut the monitor off after 1 minute when I'm going to sleep, and never turn off when I'm working on it. While it's infinitely easier to get to the power management settings in Linux, they just don't seem to work right. The gnome applet doesn't even have an option to turn off the monitor, and I installed the Kpowersave applet because I knew it at least has the option to turn off the monitor (first install of Suse was using KDE, to see if it had gotten any better since my last foray into Linux... needless to say I'm back to gnome). The problem is, and was even with KDE running, it doesn't work. It's like the setting is just ignored.

So I'm having to use the "pictures folder" screensaver, because for some weird reason, "Blank Screen" is blasting full white instead of full black :( , but that doesn't turn off the screen, backlight is still on (even when "Blank Screen" works, and goes to a black screen, it still has the backlight on)
... so I guess... any ideas on how I can get it to turn my screen off after a set time?

And... good god... wtf is up with not being able to play mp3's?! I've installed a number of libraries for both encoding and decoding mp3's (among others)... I even got desperate and installed RealPlayer 10 hoping it would come built in with mp3 plaback... no deal. From what I remember of my last foray, I just needed to install a few libraries, and it was good to go. Well those are installed, but RythmBox still says no plugin is installed to handle mp3's, and xmms doesn't see my network share that's mounted to my desktop... (but even copying an mp3 physically over, xmms still doesn't play it). Hell, it was one of the first, and easiest things to get set up when I did this before... hopefully I can get this figured out soon.

[trey85stang]

[QUOTE=DarkWolf]Wasn't too bad, once the firmware was installed, and power management turned off of it. Of course, it was all by guessing on my part, but turned out alright :) Oh, and I'll need to tweak the firewall as well, right now I've got it off completely, because it looks like it's default settings pretty much block all traffic (which might explain why the wired nic wasn't/isn't working)

The other slight annoyance is it doesn't activate my wireless nic on startup. I have to manually press Fn+F2 (usually twice before the "WiFi" led lights up to tell me the wireless nic is now turned on/active), and another half minute or so for it to pick up in Suse, connect to the router, and be ready to go. Hopefully though, I won't be needing to reboot so much... so this shouldn't really be much of an issue.

The big thing I miss right now though, is the power management. I used to set my computer up to shut the monitor off after 1 minute when I'm going to sleep, and never turn off when I'm working on it. While it's infinitely easier to get to the power management settings in Linux, they just don't seem to work right. The gnome applet doesn't even have an option to turn off the monitor, and I installed the Kpowersave applet because I knew it at least has the option to turn off the monitor (first install of Suse was using KDE, to see if it had gotten any better since my last foray into Linux... needless to say I'm back to gnome). The problem is, and was even with KDE running, it doesn't work. It's like the setting is just ignored.

So I'm having to use the "pictures folder" screensaver, because for some weird reason, "Blank Screen" is blasting full white instead of full black :( , but that doesn't turn off the screen, backlight is still on (even when "Blank Screen" works, and goes to a black screen, it still has the backlight on)
... so I guess... any ideas on how I can get it to turn my screen off after a set time?

And... good god... wtf is up with not being able to play mp3's?! I've installed a number of libraries for both encoding and decoding mp3's (among others)... I even got desperate and installed RealPlayer 10 hoping it would come built in with mp3 plaback... no deal. From what I remember of my last foray, I just needed to install a few libraries, and it was good to go. Well those are installed, but RythmBox still says no plugin is installed to handle mp3's, and xmms doesn't see my network share that's mounted to my desktop... (but even copying an mp3 physically over, xmms still doesn't play it). Hell, it was one of the first, and easiest things to get set up when I did this before... hopefully I can get this figured out soon.[/QUOTE]

xscreensaver has some power management options, should be some like you are looking for like what is in windows. Check there, I dont use power management so I am not too sure.

The mp3/wma/audio video codecs issue is the reason I no longer even try to use suse or fedora. The default installs exclude mp3 (and others) support and it is a major PITA to get them working without installing hacked up versions of the software.

[DarkWolf]

[QUOTE=trey85stang]xscreensaver has some power management options, should be some like you are looking for like what is in windows. Check there, I dont use power management so I am not too sure.

The mp3/wma/audio video codecs issue is the reason I no longer even try to use suse or fedora. The default installs exclude mp3 (and others) support and it is a major PITA to get them working without installing hacked up versions of the software.[/QUOTE]

What do you think about something like Debian/Ubuntu/Xandros? Basically I'm looking for a painless transition (eventually I'll probably go back to Gentoo, I really enjoyed that... or maybe look into Slack)... something that can be set up, and working relatively painlessly. I've got a few friends interested in switching as well, so I'm acting as the guinea pig, with the "user friendly" distro's to see which one is the least painless to get up and running.

They're going to want as little contact with the command line as possible. I personally don't mind the command line, as long as I'm familiar with the commands... which I'm not quite there yet :) But learning. So something as close to "Windows" as possible would be ideal, to help get them weened off the MS tit. The big problem is going to be games, but the main game we play is WoW and I already got that working in Cedega earlier this year when I attempted to switch, and that's what really got them interested in switching as well.

And I refuse to try Linspire :)

[trey85stang]

[QUOTE=DarkWolf]What do you think about something like Debian/Ubuntu/Xandros? Basically I'm looking for a painless transition (eventually I'll probably go back to Gentoo, I really enjoyed that... or maybe look into Slack)... something that can be set up, and working relatively painlessly. I've got a few friends interested in switching as well, so I'm acting as the guinea pig, with the "user friendly" distro's to see which one is the least painless to get up and running.

They're going to want as little contact with the command line as possible. I personally don't mind the command line, as long as I'm familiar with the commands... which I'm not quite there yet :) But learning. So something as close to "Windows" as possible would be ideal, to help get them weened off the MS tit. The big problem is going to be games, but the main game we play is WoW and I already got that working in Cedega earlier this year when I attempted to switch, and that's what really got them interested in switching as well.

And I refuse to try Linspire :)[/QUOTE]


IM currently using gentoo, which is cool.. But I will be switching back to slackware... I know slackware can install and have it setup in probably 30 minutes. Slackware is not too difficult to get going if you have the time to spend with it when you start using it.

I have never used unbuntu or xandros but a lot of people seem to like it. Debian... I never really liked apt is great and the packages are as well but debian based distro's have done much better then debian has :o I still recomend Mandrake/Mandriva for trying out linux... Most featureful and guess what.. mp3's work out of the box :D

[DarkWolf]

Word, I think I'll get Ubuntu and Mandriva started downloading, and try 'em both out over the next week or so. mp3's out of the box is nice :)

Oh, and somehow the mp3's are working now. This is about the most schitzophrenic distro I've ever seen. (not that I've used all that many to really compare...)

[DarkWolf]

Ubuntu's up and running now. Seemed to be pretty painless, even the wireless card was installed and working out of the box. I'll give this a go for a bit, then try Mandriva maybe next week.

[DarkWolf]

Holy crap, I'm already kinda in love with Ubuntu. This has been the easiest distro I've tried... it even reads my ntfs formatted external hdd by default (which I subsequently pulled everything off so I could get it formatted and ready to try and install windows on it...)

The only niggle I've got now, is streaming mp3's and jpegs over the network. Basically only Totem-xine will play mp3's, but it's playlist support is horrible. None of the other media players see the mounted smb share (granted, it's more like a virtual mount, as there's no local directory to use as a mount point). As for jpegs, if I double-click on one, it comes up as unrecognized format, but if I drag it over so it copies from the network to the local drive, not only does it instantly show a thumbnail (that it doesn't when browsing from the network), but it also will open on double-click as it normally should.

And maybe the way it's auto-mounting the network shares is the problem. I know when I tried this before earlier last year, the samba automounting never did work for me, so I manually set mount points for all my shares, and was able to browse mp3's from xmms, or rythmbox, or whatever. I guess I'll give that a go tomorrow.