Fairly frustrating
Yesterday, the postman tried to deliver my shiny new SUSE 9.1. Today, I had time to collect the package from the post-office, and even some time to try and install it on my new Dell Inspiron 5150 laptop. By now -- five minutes past eleven, post meridiem, I am feeling fairly frustrated.
I was having such high hopes for this particular release. A 2.6 kernel should mean that suspend and resume works; SuSE 9.0 was a high quality release that gave me great font rendering, and I saw no reason why that wouldn't be the case with 9.1. And SuSE 9.0 had supported all the hardware on said Dell, with the proviso that I had to manually do a modprobe hid to load the modules for the USB splitter cable that enabled me to use a ps/2 keyboard and mouse with this ps/2-port-less laptop.
However, it took a bit of fiddling -- but not too much, and all was doable from YaST -- to get the wireless network card working. Getting X to run was no trouble at all -- but I haven't tried to get the binary-only, proprietary, sick NVidia drivers that allow me to play dvd's without jitter to work.
I still need to manually install apt-get, because SuSE doesn't bundle that bit of essentiality with its distribution, afraid, perhaps, that people won't buy a new box if there's an easy way to keep up with all new software, instead of just security fixes. Sound seems to work, midi doesn't, however.
In order to enable click-by-tapping-the-pad, I had to hunt for information on the web, only to find I had a choice between compiling a special XFree driver (only SuSE ships X.org...), or using a deprecated boot parameter for the kernel. I choose the latter, even though it was deprecated -- I don't need all the power of that special X driver, could do with the finicky install procedure, and needed tap==click. That should have worked out of the box.
And then the clincher: suspend nor standby works. Suspend hangs the machine, standby works, resume works, but somehow the screen doesn't get restored at all. I tried using plain text mode, standby from X, standby from framebuffer console -- nothing works. That's going to take some serious documentation reading and experimentation. Suspend is a critical feature, I've noticed,and I'm starting to feel that having a bloody perfect suspend is worth paying double the price of a Dell for...
By the way: upgrading the old 9.0 system on the same laptop gave so many dependency errors, I gave up. I admit I had kept that system current with apt-get, instead of YOU, but still... I haven't got all that great experiences with upgrading SUSE systems from one version to another anyway. Too much cruft remains behind, too much gets broken along the way.
So, what's remaining still? Getting dvd-playing with libdecss working, of course, the NVidia drivers for X11, the Wacom Graphire tablet, the particular software selections, the profiles that switch between work, on the road, wireless and home lan, email config, checking whether cd-burning still works, discovering why the keyboard sometimes hangs on boot...
And fixing the freetype interpreter, so hinting is enabled. The current quality of fonts is abysmal... Especially with sub-pixel rendering enabled.
So, given that it has proven impossible to re-install the Windows XP that was delivered with this particular laptop, while a basic install of SUSE 9.1 too half an hour and gave me wireless network and a GUI, I am still rather disappointed. I have been using Linux since 1993, and by now I am thoroughly sick of having to hunt for information, mess with someone else's particular idea of what a config file should look like and a system where not every little bit of hardware works like it should out of the box. This little Pismo I'm typing this blog entry on has none of those issues.
I've been there, done the calculate-the-modelines X11 config dance, configured sendmail.cf by hand, installed Taylor UUCP and c-news, connected a laptop to login via xdm using a plip connection to the main machine, hacked termcap files, customized XEmacs so much it frightens my colleagues, and gotten dvd-playback working back in the days when decss was still controversial and hard to get. And it's been fun, but I've done that already, and I haven't got the slightest inclination to do it again, and again, and again.
But perhaps, perhaps, tomorrow, I'll get that beast tamed...