2007-10-01, 06:42 PM
Randy's post really strikes home for me. I've been an independent computer consultant for 12 years. I work on client and server machines for a zillion hours a week. And when I'm not working for money, I'm tinkering for love. But I really get frustrated with Linux, though I'm determined to make it work. My goal is to get comfortable enough so I can start confidently offering my clients an alternative to Windows. Right now I've got it in my head to develop a good SUSE workstation and laptop machine running Lotus Notes 8 (most of my clients are Notes users) with it's integrated "Symphony" office suite (IBM's version of OpenOffice) and Firefox. That would give my clients 90% of what they need.
Anyway, I installed SUSE 10.2 yesterday on my laptop. I took out Mandriva because as cool as it was, I couldn't get Notes to install. The SUSE install went fine. It looked like it recognized my PRO/Wireless card just fine, but I couldn't get it to logon to my wireless network. (wired connection runs perfectly). So, I searched the web and found a suggestion to install ndiswrapper. My SUSE software installer listed 4 identical entries for ndiswrapper so I installed them all. (Later when I rebooted the machine, GRUB had added 2 choices for my boot "Kernel-2.6.18.2-34-bigsmp" and "Kernel-2.6.18.2-34-xen" What are these for and why would installing ndiswrapper create these entries?). Once ndiswrapper was installed I could see my wireless network and logon, BUT whilst I can browse my local network (firewall, server, etc) I cannot browse the internet. Not even if I enter a known external IP address.
I tinkered for a couple of hours, Google-ing like crazy, but nothing helped. One post suggested I disable IpV6 but that had no effect. Can someone help out here?