Your experience is almost a mirror image of mine. It seems to me that YaST2 is the culprit. It couldn't recognize sqat if it was setting in it, on my box. I have come to believe that it has reset the IRQs of my scsi and lp0 to the same value, 11. I've always had problems with my Yamaha sound chip, that's why I use OSS. Alsa has NEVER worked. I think you right about the modules thing too. Doing a make module and make module_install, even if followed by "demod -a", still generates a TON of reference errors, noted in a previous email. A problem which I've never had in the past. I'm beginning to wonder if they cut too much fat and took some muscle and bone with their slicing... I know other milage may vary, but in my experience with SuSE since 5.3, if I totaled all the hours spent installing the previous distros the sum wouldn't equal what I've spent trying to get 7.1 oddities ironed out. Gotta do it by tonight, I have bills to pay and my data is setting on my zip drive. JLK On Tuesday 27 February 2001 10:25, Steven T. Hatton wrote:
It must be frustrating for people such as Lenz and Philipp to see their wonderful product released and see nothing but posts of what's wrong with it immediately thereafter (Well almost immediately, it took a few weeks to get here {;-)> Best Buy Laural; $50 BTW.) I guess much of the reason for this is the fact that, when things work, we don't talk about it nearly as much. It's the parts that don't work which usually get the most attention on this list. I hope to get to the good news in another message soon. If I get too distracted to get that off, I hope the folks at SuSE understand that I am truly grateful for all their hard work.
Thanks again SuSE for a wonderful product. And thanks to all the other freedom coders in the world.
Now here's a bit of what I hit. My first attempt was an upgrade. That went fairly well, once I gave up on trying to use YaST2 for that purpose. I kept telling it to upgrade existing packages and it just told me it had nothing to do. Perhaps there's a way, but I didn't see it. Admittedly, I had an installation FUBAR (Fouled) by my incesant attempts to push the envelope.
1) When I attempted to login I fond my keyboard was not responding. My mouse was equally unresponsive. I was able to ssh in and kill X thus restoring my keyboard. This probably happened because I changed from using a Microsoft IMPS/2 Trackball to using a Logitech TrackMan Marble Wheel USB. IIRC rebooting with the Microsoft pointer fixed the problem.
2) Sax2 would not run. It got to the point where it should go into GUI mode, blanked the screen and returned me to the command prompt. Since I already had a working XF86Config, I simply gave up on SaX2 and continued to explore things.
3) The sound card gave me more problems {:-(> Remember way back before y'all lynched Lankton he had a fit over his sound not working? Guess what? I still have the same sound card as he did. What happened with the upgrade was that, when attempting to play sound, I would briefly get the sound to start and then silence. When investigating I discovered a rather mangled modules.conf. (actually not that bad) It has combined the results of the YaST/ALSA configuration from 7.1 and the original setup in the modules.conf. It *was* well commented and well organized. I could have stayed with the upgrade and getting things working. I, however, wanted to determine if SuSE had been able to get the detection of my hardware to work. So I decided to do a new installation.
4) When I went to do a new installation I originally intended to simply install over the original, thus saving me the hassle of reinstalling Mathematica, JBuilder, and other evil capitalist tools. (Just kidding) Well YaST2 gave me dire warnings that It would possibly cause my hard drive to explode into millions of little pieces and other nasty things If I didn't reformat my partitions, especially the reiser FS ones. I like reiser very much but it can be a pain. I thus backed up the most important stuff on my system and did a scrub. (/etc, /home, /opt/download, /root) The man page on ifconfig is something you should have a basic understanding of. Its very handy to be able to establish a network connection with a few command lines.
5) The kernel and kernel modules that ship with 7.1 do not seem to support my SCSI tape drive. I don't remember the option in the kernel I set to get that to work, but I believe I have to go out of my way to get that correct. It's something like ???-002 vender specific stuff in the SCSI section.
*) Booted form DVD just fine. Well worth the $100 investment. Went into GUI mode and gave me a pointer from my Logitech USB. YaST2 is very nice. But I want to save the good stuff for the sequel ;-)
6) I was able to configure my ATI Rage Fury through YaST2/SaX2. . . except it still over clocks my monitor in 1600 x 1200. I need to review the HowTo and man page on XF86Config. It looks like it's still something I should know about.
7) It said it detected my Creative Labs AWE64 Gold, but I ain't heard a peep out of it yet. I can see it listed in the IO-ports, DMAs, and IRQs I don't see any modules loaded except for snd. And I did not hear anything when testing the volume. Perhaps I should just toss this card and get an SB-Live. I hate to do that because this is a very nice card, and I know it can be auto-configured. 4-Front does it right every time, I just can't play freely with the kernel if I use their product. The most frustrating thing about this is that SuSE uses my card as an example of how to set up a sound card "by hand" in the SuSE book. I have done that before, but then I get into the same issues with playing with the kernel and with other things such as ALSA. The irony of this is that the setup in Windows NT also stinks for this card. And the card is not the problem. Perhaps its just an orphan. <shrug>
8) Lots of good to say about YaST2, but that will have to wait. Things I found bad were the necessity of to scroll horizontally to read the descriptions of packages (OK, I'm whining) and the fact, IIRC, that if I got an 'a' indicating that a module was selected by a dependency, I did not get an indication of what that dependency was. But this *is* knit-picking.
9) Still don't have my wheel working with the Logitech TrackMan USB.
There are some other minor issues I could complain about, but the hardware configuration and detection is far more important to me. This stuff really needs to work if SuSE is to become suitable for Mom and Dad, not to mention my Software engineer brother who doesn't care to futz with this kind of stuff. It needs to work. Sure I have spent far more time that it is worth to get these devices to work. The direct return in time savings from buying a "compatible" device would be well worth the money. This is why accurate honest, up to date, hcdbs are very important.
Sure, I don't follow them too closely, but I am willing to face the consequences. This is how I learn. Others just want it to work.
Steve