When I joined FNAL for the first couple of weeks I just used my laptop. We could configure both the wire and wireless network cards to work with FNAL network thanks to the help of SuSE mailing-list experts. Then I got an office and a desk computer at work. At home I got the DSL activated and thanks to a AT&T technician I could configure both my laptop wire and wireless cards to work with the AT&T network. This morning I came to the lab with my laptop as my office has been remodeled and the desktop computer is still disconnected. As you can imagine I could not connect my laptop to FNAL network either through the wire or the wireless card. It is the same problem that arouse with the printers. I configured my laptop printing system to communicate with CUPS server here at FNAL. So I can print from my laptop when I'm at the lab. But I can no more print at home as my local EPSON ink-jet printer configuration has been overwritten or invalidated by the configuration I had to do for printing at the lab. Some time ago someone told me it's possible to have a profile for each environment where the laptop is operated. My understanding is that each profile uniquely identifies some environment specific settings so that different environment configurations can be used alternatively. How can I create and use more profiles ? How can I relate the single profile with a specific configuration ? Once you have your laptop running in a specific environment, such as home, go into YaST2/System/Profile manager. At that point it will prompt you to enable the profile manager. At this point, you can create a profile, and name it something like Home. Make sure that it is now the active profile,

On Monday 15 May 2006 3:46 pm, Maura Edeweiss Monville wrote: then save it. Now, create another profile, say FNAL. Make that the active profile. Now configure your system for that environment. Then save the profile. (I personally find it easier to use the scpm command to create new profiles). I currently have the profiles: HomeWired - static IP wired HomeWireless - static IP with encryption OpenWireless - unsecured Wireless with DHCP for MIT and hotels. HPWired - Dynamic IP with some HP settings. Dynamic - Wired dynamic IP. This is for the cases where I might plug into a wired network, such as a local college or a hotel. You can have as many as you want. Each can have different network settings, different printers setup. The only thing that is a bit complicated is the proxy settings. One issue that I have is that in some cases, I get a "waiting for mandatory devices", but it is relatively easy to get around this from KDE. -- Jerry Feldman Boston Linux and Unix user group http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9 PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9