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[some bits have been snipped for brevity or where I have no knowledge...] On Sun, Apr 28, 2002 at 01:52:11PM +0100, al@alsutton.com wrote:
On Sunday 28 April 2002 13:22, Philipp Thomas wrote:
This makes me nervous as to which other devices are supported within the Linux kernel, but not in SuSE.
What do you mean by not supported? That the hardware scan doesn't find the devices? That you can't configure the device via YaST2?
My concern is that a number of products are advertised as "Working with RedHat", I had always seen this as pretty much interchangeable with "Working with Linux", but I'm now not so confident.
They are pretty much synonymous (sp?). However, some bits of hardware/ software won't be fully integrated into the setup system properly, requiring you to edit a config file, or enable a service, etc. Also, sometimes bugs do turn up. That's life.
I have a SMC 2632W wireless LAN PCMCIA card. Under RH 7.2 I configured it as eth0 when it was plugged in, and it was treated under as a normal ethernet device. Under SuSE 8.0 I have been unable to get it work (I posted the error message to the suse-line-e list earlier today), and the only information I've found is in the unofficial FAQ (at ) is definatley not the procedure I want to have to perform on each laptop that needs to use wireless networking.
As mentioned elsewhere, some bits are produced earlier than others, simply because SuSE doesn't have infinite resources, and features have to be prioritised. Wlan cards are a relatively new phenomenon, and Linux support is similarly new. I've not tried to get my wlan card running yet, but the last time I looked, the documentation for the linux wlan drivers was pretty fragmented.
Are you saying that all of the CDs & the DVD in SuSE 8 are free from copyright issues (Including the ones in th pay directory). If this is true what does the extra money go towards when I buy the professional edition over the personal edition?
It pays the people who build, test and check every extra package. It pays for the extra books you get. It pays for the extra media cost (and maybe extra shipping). And yes, it might also pay royalties for the 'pay' packages (I don't work for SuSE, so I can't comment on whether this is the case). However, you're making _backups_, and even if the DMCA (or equivalents has managed to remove the 'fair use' principle, I'd be very doubtful that SuSE (or anyone else) would sue you for copyright violation because you made backups. Of course, IANAL, but some common sense should come into play here...
They used to differ slightly in contents as there's a bit more space on the DVD. But even if YaST2 complains, you're able to continue working, so what's the hassle?
The hassle is the apparent error message which doesn't tell me if it's OK to procced or not. If it doesn't cause a problem why am I warned?
a) Because if the packages *do* still differ slightly between versions, then some people would want to know - there's an equivalent counter- argument... b) Because SuSE are busy making the rest of the distro work smoothly, rather than prioritising trivial things like this...
Have they cerified SuSE 8.0? If so then it may fit their needs, but as the subject of this Email states, these views are MY opinion of SuSE 8.0 operating to MY needs.
Like others said, if you don't like it, go use something else. If you have something that meets your needs better than SuSE, then of course you'd be silly *not* to use it... IME, no distribution ever has every possible thing working, with easy configuration even in one release. There's always something you have to go and fix. If they did, they'd either be hopelessly out-of-date, or they'd completely dominate the Linux market (since no-one would buy anything else). As a small anecdote, I tried a few distributions to decide which one to install across my network of relatively diverse machines. SuSE was the only distribution which installed cleanly on all the machines. Admittedly, this was a few years ago (in the days of RH5.2).
That's making it too simple. As we don't have limitless resources, neither in time nor developers, we have to make priorities. So things were many will profit are implemented earlier then those where only few will profit.
But I'm looking for a system my support people can use with the minimum of time spent fixing a problem. I don't want to get into them hacking config files just to get someones Wireless lan card working, or being called every time a user wants to install some new software over the network from the central server becuase they have a warning message about the version on the server being different from the version on their machine when it's not.
Then maybe you've chosen the wrong distribution. SuSE is generally very polished and easy to configure, but IMHO, they tend to lag behind RH slightly on getting things working, but once they do work, they work better. It's not that long ago that RH had serious problems with marginal tools like gcc... Oh, and these are my opinions, not necessarily those of ST... :-) -- David Smith Work Email: Dave.Smith@st.com STMicroelectronics Home Email: David.Smith@ds-electronics.co.uk Bristol, England