Thinkpads Forum

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.)

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?

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.

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

Ryan

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