I settled on Debian a long time ago and prefer to use it on any and all platforms. However, given the fact that I write about GNU/Linux, I often take a peek at other distributions. Last week I took a look at OpenSUSE, not from a desire to write a review (there are enough slavering "reviews" on the net) but as a brief experiment to get a wireless card working. My comments on the distribution, therefore, should be looked at in that context.

Some background first. I inherited a six-year-old Acer laptop from one of my offspring - but I figure that a P3-600 with 256 meg of RAM certainly has some life left in it. Installing a new operating system on this machine is complicated by the fact that the CD-ROM -a proprietary device from Acer called Easy-Link - has become rather erratic. At times it reads a CD and at others it refuses to do so. There is no pattern to this behaviour - the same CD will be accepted one time and rejected the next. And it makes no difference if the CD is professionally produced or one made at home.  The floppy drive is on the same external hardware as the CD-ROM but, in sharp contrast, is still grinding away.

Thus, installing GNU/Linux on this machine meant looking for a set of floppies which would facilitate a network install. Debian, fortunately, has just such a remedy for machines without a CD-ROM. I came up against another obstacle: while one of the PCMCIA wireless cards which I have (D-Link-G650, using an Atheros chipset) has drivers available for Linux, the other, a Netgear WG511v2, which has a chipset from Marvell Technology, has no Linux drivers. I made the mistake of downloading the floppies for Debian's stable distribution, something I realised a good three months later.

Murphy's Law came into play. The D-Link card, a brand new one, turned out to be defective, the third such card to die. I tried to get it going, using the drivers from the MadWifi project, but after seeing anything from 40 to 90 percent of packets drop out, I gave up. I didn't feel like asking for a replacement as the card was sold to me by a friend - and the last time it was replaced was just a month or two back. Then an accident forced me into bed for a few months. As soon as I was able to hobble around, my first task was to sit down and look at the old laptop afresh. There is a method of using a wrapper plus Windows drivers to get a wireless card working on GNU/Linux and I thought I would explore this path.

 Having read that some distributions support the NetGear card out of the box (so to speak), I thought I would look at Fedora and OpenSUSE. Fedora is a community project supported by Red Hat and OpenSUSE is Novell's equivalent. Before this, I tried every GNU/Linux CD in my possession - and I have a fair few - but the CD-ROM would not recognise any of them. I wrote to Ubuntu and obtained a pressed CD - that booted but then hung after a while.

Fedora has a six-floppy method of doing a network install but one image proved to be defective. I tried repeatedly but the sixth image just wouldn't continue the good work of the first five. One option gone. After that I looked at OpenSUSE - the only way of doing a network install that I could find was by using a small image on a CD. Despite the behaviour of the CD-ROM drive, I decided to take a chance.

After burning the image, I popped the CD into the drive and closed my eyes. Wonder, of wonders, it booted. But obstacles were not far off- the process went as far as downloading the needed files for a basic install. Then I saw a message on-screen indicating that the laptop had insufficient memory for loading the installation program. Yast, or Yet Another Set-up Tool, the well-known SUSE app, needed more than 256 meg of RAM to run.

I restarted the process after having first made a swap partition on the hard drive. Once again, miraculously, the OpenSUSE CD image was recognised and booted. This time Yast recognised the swap space. Things progressed and the installation program finally indicated that a total of 2.1 GB of software would need to be downloaded. The downloading started but then the tiredness factor - I had slept a total of nine hours over the previous three days - kicked in and contributed its quota of trouble. I decided to sleep for a while and, as I normally do before going to bed, powered down my own PC, the very same machine that was providing an IP address to the laptop via DHCP. Next morning, I realised my stupidity.

By now, a deadline was looming. In a couple of days I would be due for an operation which would again put me in bed for a week or so. I was determined not to be without a laptop running GNU/Linux this time. I tried to boot the laptop with the same CD again, but it would not fire up. I then burnt a fresh CD and tried. This time it booted up and I was able to go through the installation without any of the earlier problems. It has become longer and more painful than it once was - at least then it was slow but efficient.

I noticed that while the installation program recognised the presence of both the network interfaces - the PCI network card and the wireless card - OpenSUSE did not configure the wireless card. I looked for the wrapper program and found it. There were warnings about downloading it as it taints the kernel. (I found the warnings a bit hypocritical after Novell's recent deal with Microsoft.)

With the wrapper program, I used the drivers from the NetGear CD and got the card functioning. But then strangely I wasn't able to access the internet. After a bit of poking around, I discovered that the firewall, a rather gargantuan set of rules, was the culprit. After disabling that, I was able to finally see the internet. (This condition, of having a network properly configured but being unable to see the internet, is often experienced by people who install Windows XP.)

Some things I noticed about OpenSUSE - one, while the installation indicated a total of 2.1 GB had been downloaded each time, my ISP's volume usage table showed only 1.2 GB each time. Funny. I've found that this ISP keeps a pretty reliable usage table - it has matched by own downloads to within 5 or 10 meg over the past 18 months.

Two, I was amazed that a distribution needed more than 256 meg of RAM for its installation program to run. (I wasn't offered the choice of a text-based installation, as Red Hat did.) Three, the firewall annoyed me - what was the point of all the elaborate configuration if you are finally blocked from accessing the internet? Four, my laptop wouldn't power down - I had to manually switch it off. Five, the OpenSUSE menu has become huge horizontally - it spreads across the width of my screen and when you have a 12" LCD screen it's enough to annoy the hell out of you.

I had had enough of OpenSUSE. I went back to Debian, found the latest set of floppies and reinstalled. This time, the NetGear card was recognised. I used the card with the wrapper. I don't feel comfortable with it, though, and I'll get a replacement for  the D-Link as soon as I'm up and walking again. I generally try to practise what I preach.

I learnt a few things: never buy an Acer laptop; stick to your own distribution; persevere and you'll finally get it right; figuring out things for yourself and not looking for pre-built answers is the best way of solving a problem.