Il giorno dom, 21/09/2008 alle 21.32 -0700, Kai Ponte ha scritto:
My father-in-law's wife (my mother-in-law passed away some years ago) recently had me get her a new computer. She had a six-year-old system running expee that was ready to visit the recycle center.
I got her a new Dell system with freeDOS and promptly loaded openSUSE 10.3. Her only requirements were word processing, email (AOL) and eBay.
So I get her the system and eventually configure it for AOL mail using Thunderbird.
Although I had some initial problems setting up her system at their house - she uses Wireless to connect to the cable modem from another room - it seemed to work.
However, we kept running into issues. The wifi (Linksys running ndiswrapper) will continually drop. They have Cox cable, who will NOT support Linux configuration. Also, her AOL mail will continually fail to pull all mail through thunderbird. (If this is related to the wifi dropping, I don't know.)
Finally, after two months, I'm giving up. I'm going to install Vista on her system and pass her off to someone else who will support her. (She can use my laptop's copy of Vista Business, since I wiped it off over a year ago.)
It is unfortunate that such a nice system like openSUSE will fall to a simple thing like not having a good solid network driver or good network interface. (I have intel drivers in my laptops and rarely have issues, while KNetwork manager is okay, but not very user-friendly.)
I hope all of you out there can take a moment and request linux support from a vendor you know doesn't support them currently. I have written Cox a letter encouraging them to begin supporting Linux like my DSL provider does.
Linux is not yet perfect for desktop use, that is true. I had a lot of problems a couple of weeks ago, trying to install OpenSuse 11 on a (not too) old Dell PC (PIII/700, 512MB RAM), that was unsuccessful both with a Net Install and with a DVD. Then I tried to install on it a Fedora 9, and everything was OK at the first install. I am no Linux expert, but I am neither a newbie (although more experienced with Debian and Ubuntu). Still I remember when I purchased my first Linux distro box (Suse 7! A long time ago...), and could install on a dual-boot PC without problems. I do not know what is wrong with OpenSuse 11, (maybe the kernel version?), but decided to give up, for the time being, and still hope to be able to install next release... -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org