Suse 10.0 on a ThinkPad T42

[Edward Mendelson]

Downloaded the bitttorrent of Suse 10.0 and installed it on a T42 with the option to use the Gnome desktop. Can't say I liked it much. Setup was very fiddly and fussy if you don't simply accept the defaults. It did detect all the hardware, and worked *very* smoothly with the IBM/Atheros wireless card (unlike Ubuntu), but it seems to let me use Fn+F4 either for suspend-to-RAM (sleep) OR suspend-to-disk (hibernate), but there's doesn't seem to be a GUI option to use Fn+F11 for Hibernate and Fn+F4 for sleep, as IBM designed it.

Suse boots fairly quickly, has a GUI for all sorts of things, and includes all sorts of things that Ubuntu doesn't. Hibernation and suspend both worked perfectly. But I find I still prefer Ubuntu's out-of-the-box simplicity (although I'm sorry to report that the Ubuntu Release Candidate - out today - doesn't reliably recover from hibernation). Your preferences may definitely vary.

(And no, before someone asks, the wireless light did not go under Suse.)

[aabram]

Did hibernate work just out of the box without you having to create special partition of file or fiddle with anything else? How's the battery life if you did get a chance to measure it?

[Edward Mendelson]

No fiddling of any kind for hibernation to work (I did have a swap partition, if that counts as fiddling.) Didn't test the battery. I noticed that Suse was sometimes unable to power down the system and I had to turn it off manually. None of this is a problem with Ubuntu.

[netguardianii]

Edward,
I'm just curious: Did you download ISO images and burn them onto CDs, or did you perform a network install?

Ryan

[Edward Mendelson]

I used Azureus (a Bittorrent variant) to download the DVD ISO and burned it to a DVD-R.