New Laptop Updated
By Ian Scott
As I wrote the other day, I purchased a new Dell Studio 17 laptop and have been working to get OpenSuSe 11.2 working on it. I finally managed to get Wireless working by using the broadcom-wl package from the packman repositories. Once I installed them, the wireless device was recognized and I could see the network here at the office. I had problems connecting to it however. It seems that WEP passphrases aren’t all that great – and Windows and Linux have different ways of converting to and from HEX.
The fix was to change the security settings in the Netgear wireless router. It’s an ancient model (relatively speaking) and I had no record of the admin password, so I needed to use the reset button to reset it back to factory defaults (username admin, password: password) and make the changes.
After I had wireless working, I took the laptop to my girlfriend’s apartment in Guelph and successfully connected to her Bell Canada internet wireless. Bell prints the security code on the router, but the print is so small, it almost needs a magnifying glass to read it. After some attempts at wondering “what is that digit?” and experimenting a bit, we finally got the laptop working there with Internet access as well.
The next job was to get the graphics card working, an ATI Radeon Mobility HD 4650 I believe. Graphics under the native Linux drivers sucked. After some time, I tried the proprietary drivers for Linux that ATI provides. I did the automatic installation as trying to create an OpenSuSe package just did not work.
I had noticed that there was no /etc/xorg.conf file installed when I installed Suse 11.2 on the laptop so I thought I should run sax2. Silly me! I did not need to do that at all, and wasted a lot of time on xorg.conf configurations.
What happened was that the ATI Radeon driver successfully installed and after an ‘aticonfig –initial’, it wrote to the xorg.conf file. But when I rebooted, it appeared I had no mouse support. The actual problem was that my mouse cursor was invisible. After realizing that was the problem, some posts in the opensuse forum helped to bring me a little closer to the final solution:
Completely remove xorg.conf
Re-run ‘aticonfig –initial’
Add the following lines to the Device section of the resulting xorg.conf (which aticonfig –initial produced):
Option “HWCursor” “off”
Option “SWCursor” “on”
After saving the file and rebooting, I had a beautiful desktop with a visible mouse cursor.
Now to transfer files over….
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