thanks for the pointers

[JonathanGennick]

Thanks everyone, for the suggestions. I'd already found the tpctl home page, but it will be a day or two (or three) before I have time again to sit down and read through all of it, to see whether I can came up w/a solution.

I knew someone was going to suggest Ubuntu <grin>. But I really don't want to distro-hop at this point. I have a paid-for copy of Suse, and I rather like Suse, and what little Linux knowledge I have is all from using Suse over the years to run one, specific application on a desktop.

I'm still mystified as to why Suse would distribute a package as specific as tpcttl without testing to verify that it works.

Fortunately though, most of the Thinkpad functionality works just fine. My volume up/down buttons for example, work. There's no on-screen display when I adjust the volume, but it does go up and down. (Oddly, the software volume control in the Gnome panel has no effect at all) Ditto the Fn-Home and Fn-End to adjust screen brightness. I can dim and brighten the screen, but there's no on-screen display to show where I'm at on the brightness scale.

And sleep (or suspend-to-RAM) works, and it works more quickly, I think, under Suse than under Windows. I've never had sleep work on a laptop under Linux before. I about fell out of my chair yesterday when I first tried it, only to have it actually work. Suspend-to-disk, however, does not work at all. I find that bizarre, because it worked fine under Suse 9.3 (and suspend-to-ram did not). Nor does my middle trackpoint button enable scrolling like I want it to. I did find a web page with some information that might fix the scrolling, but I don't want to try it until I have more time.

So the problems are really just niggling, little annoyances. And I like the look and feel of Gnome far too much to want to revert back to Windows. I'm thrilled, actually, that things are working as well as they are.

[smugiri]

just so that you know, with SuSE, suspend to disk issues are usually related to the swap file not being atleast 2*RAM. Try googling this and you will see a whole bunch of sites talking about this.