folks, it seems as if a trend is emerging here. for some reason -- whether it is hardware that is not built to the appropriate level of a still-evolving standard, or linux's application of that standard, which was cooked up by microsoft, intel, and toshiba -- acpi as shipped with suse 8.2 and enabled by default is breaking a lot of stuff. for a start, many if not all gigabyte motherboards are unable to use network cards or the onboard networking. this seems true of the mbs of some other makers as well. as with early pcmcia or early usb (or, sadly, current serial), something is badly broken. the support database does not even hint that this is a problem -- even if you do a search on acpi. (the three items listed all deal with power management or vmware.) nor would anybody -- i do not know what led linuxworld999 to it -- guess that acpi is the culprit. could, maybe, someone from suse who is on this list forward a note to the guys who handle the database, such that an appropriate entry be made? this thing is a real showstopper unless, as has been suggested, one have another distribution/version available or another machine. and, while you're at it, a little something about disabling hardware detection if you have a serial mouse (didn't, for instance, replace your perfectly functional $100 kensington trackball)? the database is silent on this issue as well. it would turn a lot of sour stories -- i'll gladly quote the ones sent to me privately -- to happy ones if people were able to find out about this stuff. -- dep http://www.linuxandmain.com -- outside the box, barely within the envelope, and no animated paperclip anywhere.