Comments on: Installing OpenSUSE 10.2 on a T60 Thinkpad

By: Christian Krog Madsen

Christian Krog Madsen — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 14:25:49 +0000

@Peter:

For VLC check out:
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-suse.html

I do not use VLC myself, so I have not checked whether it works.

As for the modem, it was not autodetected and I have not tried to get it working. Apparently, some people are able to make it work with the linuxant (http://www.linuxant.com/drivers/).

By: Christian Krog Madsen

Christian Krog Madsen — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 13:40:46 +0000

Hi Norbert.
As far as I recall, I did nothing special to make the built-in wireless work. I found this over at ThinkWiki (http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Installing_openSUSE_10.2_on_an_IBM_ThinkPad_T60#Hardware):

* Intel 3945ABG Wireless ethernet adapter

NOTE!
Install w/Extra’s CD, or later you will need to install the ipw-firmware and ipw3945d packages from a non-oss repository or the Extras CD. Also, make sure when you are testing that you have the hardware based network kill switch turned off for network/bluetooth. It is located near the IR port in the front. You can also turn the kill switch on and off using Fn + F5, so you do not really need to use the hardware based kill switch should not be enabled.

After you enable the wireless with the kill switch, you will need to reboot for the interface to be detected.

So far the only problem I have with the wireless is that it fails to reconnect to a WPA2 encrypted network after the computer has resumed from suspend mode. I have to reboot to connect again. I have heard that this is a known problem on Windows too.

Hope that helps?

By: Norbert

Norbert — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 10:26:49 +0000

Thanks for your review – I installed Suse 10.2 yesterday on my new T60 (after removing XP – I want to try to install it later on a virtual machine in Linux).
Everything was OK so far – except what you say here: “I really like the NetworkManager applet, which makes it a breeze to switch between wired and wireless networks. . . It automatically lists available wireless networks with their signal strength and security setting.” That is what it did on my former 10.0 and 10.1 machines (not on the new T60). On the T60 I have wired access to the Intent, but in spite of several hours of work, I cannot get the wireless access to work. KNetworkManager sees only my wired network.
The KNetworkManager allows me under Options to Enable or Disable Wireless – but this does not seem to have any real effect.
I have installed ipw-firmware “Firmware for Intel PRO/Wireless WLAN Cards” for “2100/22ooGB (aka Centrino) WLAN cards” – I do not know what else I may be missing or have done wrong.

Any advice would be highly appreciated.

Norbert
(writing from a different computer under XP)

By: Peter Berg

Peter Berg — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 11:10:49 +0000

I read your article on installing SuSE 10.2 on a T60, and have been doing exactly the same, or trying at least.

You say that in the installation, that all your hardware was detected. Did this apply to your modem as well? I have had no sucess with this at all. The other non-success story has been loading VLC.

Any help with these two topics would be much appreciated.

Peter

By: Eudoxus

Eudoxus — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 14:08:51 +0000

Thanks for good review! I like SuSE very much for its overall polish and Yast control center. However for various reasons I switched to PCLOS. One of them was SuSE’s speed – unfortunately it is very sluggish and bloated. I hope they will improve that in future.