** Yvonne Everett ye103910@googlemail.com [2009-02-25 00:26]:
I've just had delivered an HP 2133 with SuSE installed. I have broadband connection at home which is setup with an ADSL router so I normally just have to plug in and the connection to the internet is direct. From the console session I can see the router, I can see that I have an IP address and I can even ping google.co.uk, bbc.co.uk etc. However, I cannot use Firefox, eventually I get the timeout message. Also I cannot get online updates (I've tried apt-get update from the command line) and I cant even seem to find the icon where I register for updates. Can anyone help me please as I'm new to SuSE (I have used Ubuntu previously).
** end quote [Yvonne Everett]
I've got one of these, and whilst the hardware is great, I'm afraid I tend to consider SuSE the worst version of Linux I've ever had the misfortune to encounter [1].
When I first started the machine I went through a registration process, but was unable to complete because I couldn't connect to my wireless network (it's going back a few months now, but iirc I didn't have an option for setting up WPA during the install). I seem to remember that there was a registration option in the control centre, but I can't find it now, so it may have been removed for some reason [2]. When I tried to use one of the various incarnations of the software installation utility it forced me through entering a registration ID and took me to a website to register. Sadly having done this on the SuSE website it took a few days before the ID became active and I could actually continue to update the sources and install any software. Once I had done this I found the range of software available sadly lacking (no sign of Thunderbird for example, just a single option for each type of application it seems).
As for internet access via Firefox, I've not had to configure anything, but then my network has no proxy at the moment.
[1] Oddly the switch from OS/2 and Windows to my first Linux boot (Caldera with the Looking Glass desktop iirc) was less of a culture shock than trying SuSE after using Debian/Ubuntu for the past 8 years. Maybe my expectations are higher, but for the first time using Linux I feel restricted, and after hunting round to find an easy way to install Thunderbird I finally found an RPM to download and ran into the old dependency hell that was one of the factors of my abandonment of Red Hat.
[2] Reliability of this software install has not been good, and has made Windows look rock solid! I shut down the machine a while back and it locked on me (I can't think of having ever had that before on Linux, but clearly it can happen). After waiting for a long time to see if it would sort itself out the battery was about to expire, so (not having access to charging facilities since I was on the road) I was forced to power off. On booting up when I was able to again I found so many problems that I called HP and ordered an install CD so I could reinstall.
The power management is no longer working; it no longer boots to a graphical login prompt (ironically I actually prefer a CLI login!); the graphics modes were lost and I needed to reconfigure X; Firefox no longer shows anything in the downloads window, and the bookmarks were gone, it often looses saved sessions now; I would say that Evolution won't start, but it never did! There are other issues, and I need to get my USB CDRW working so I can reinstall (probably with Ubuntu or Debian). I also note that, in spite of there being a custom kernel RPM available for SuSE 10 for the VIA chipset used, the install appears to be a standard SuSE 10 install with no consideration to the netbook hardware at all. Oh, and support wise (bar getting the CD) HP tell you to tall to Novell/SuSE, and Novell tell you to talk the the hardware vendor!
Hardware wise it is great though - although the new Atom based version looks to address the only issues I have with the machine - plus introduce a new one, it'll be over twice what I payed for this I suspect, so wouldn't have even been in the running had it been around when I bought this one.