[plug] New toy closer to being usable

[Richard Meyer]

Hi all,

I know here are some of you following my travails with my new Dell
6400. 

I've got the Radeon drivers installed and what a toil! It's not nearly
as easy as doing Nvidia drivers with SUSE Linux, where you just click to
install on the first YOU update.

Anyway, I got SUSE 10.1 installed and it's rather nice - lots of
bleeding edge software - they've changed a few things, like online
updates are done by Red Carpet rather than Yast Online Update. This
*fails* when it tries to install the first upgrades, but you can use
YAST to start off YOU manually and it works as it always did.

Anyway - after I installed, I had these huge bloated fonts and screens.
I could tell Sax2 to change from 800x600 to 1280x800, but it was a waste
of breath. Eventually I used this page
http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/17340.html to install the
drivers. There is one caveat - when I tried to run that long incantation
of theirs about: sax2 -r -m 0=fglrx
-b /usr/share/doc/packages/fglrx/sax2-profile - it failed - I eveutally
found a README file that said to leave off everything after the
"0=fglrx" part, and then it worked brilliantly - glxgears gave me 1550
frames/sec, from a laptop chipset, so I'm happy.

Now to play with sound ...

Btw - out of the box it identified the wireless chipset, and it
complained that it couldn't find the firmware - so a download and a "cp"
and I'll be there - it identified and installed the ethernet Broadcom
4400. Disk partitions are all /dev/sd* and the DVD writer is /dev/sr0

It does *not* see the Ricoh 5-in-1 card reader at all - no messages in
dmesg whatsoever.

 Anyway - cheers to all.
-- 
Richard Meyer <meyerri at westnet.com.au>