:-) Tough Love :-) On Thursday 15 September 2005 00:59, Howard Coles Jr. wrote:

I have had the most horrible time with SUSE 9.3.  The Native video Drivers from ATI, and the madwifi drivers for the Atheros Wireless NIC completely lockup the PC.

This is *not* the fault of the distribution. Thank BG/M$ for discouraging hardware vendors from supporting Linux properly.

Worse, is that now the Ndiswrapper for the wirless NIC just keeps dropping out on me, and there are times when bringing it down and backup, IT locks up the PC.  I HAVE NONE of these problems in Windows, by the way, I have also tried what few suggestions I have received up till now, all to NO avail. (THANKS to those who have tried to help!)

Not having these problems with M$haft is almost completely irrelevant. All it confirms is the hardware will support that other OS. It tells you nothing about it's ability to perform adequately under Linux, which demands great performance from the hardware so it can deliver great performance to you. I have seen countless times marginal hardware seeming to operate OK under that other OS but the weaknesses become apparent under Linux. So, please don't bash SUSE and 9.3 as though they are the certain cause of your problems. They aren't.

Does anyone know of one of the following: 1.  A way to compile the kernel so that I can get my toshiba laptop to function properly, or some little or rarely known modules that will help. OR 2.  A way to compile the ATI Drivers and / or the Atheros (madwifi) drivers so that I can actually run Linux? (or a distribution that doesn't make it so hard on me?)

Howard, out of all your posts, I *still* can't tell if you've ruled out basic problems. How long did you run memtest86? Did you get any errors at all? What makes you think you need to compile your own kernel? Do you have specific information from your research pointing to this, or are you guessing? What makes you think the existing driver modules are insufficient and need to be custom compiled for that system? Again: Have you found specific clues which point to this conclusion or are you guessing?

I have posted all the hardware specs more than once, but, here they are again... <snip)

I did some Googling and, among several other similarly worded posts from you on your problems, I found the following excellent advice given to you on this list a number of days ago:

Check out both http://tuxmobil.org/ and http://www.linux-laptop.net/ and the Toshiba laptop areas. Lots of A75 news there. Don't worry too much that your exact Linux distro isn't listed. Most often you can get the info you need to make it work on any distro.

What did you find at, or through, these sites? Anything? Was any of it helpful or instructive at all? Any links we should be looking at to better understand these problems? What modifications to your configuration have you tried? What were the results? (error messages and log entries, not moaning) If all you do is: - keep repeating your specs - limit yourself to checking/confirming basic installation settings - omit all details of your troubleshooting efforts - omit all the resulting error messages and log entries you will /never/ get these problems ironed out. These kinds of lists work best when you work, too, and that sometimes means - getting your hands dirty and working at the command line - reading documentation and taking copious notes - posting intelligent, specific questions and providing detailed results - following suggestions and posting *those* results - and so on... Now... your assignment is to answer the twelve questions I've posed for you here. Maybe this will give the gurus on SLE enough of what they need to start actually helping you. :-) regards, - Carl