SuSE 9.2 on Thinkpad X30

[JonathanGennick]

I've been lurking on these forums for a few weeks now, but now I could use some help. My hard drive failed recently, and, on a whim, I decided to try installing SuSE Linux 9.2 on the new drive that I bought. Last time I tried to install Linux on a laptop was some five years ago when I tried to put Corel Linux on a Toshiba. I was pleasantly surprised the other night at how well SuSE went on my Thinkpad. The result is almost useable.

Almost.

I'm encountering a few problems:

* Try as I might, I cannot get the wireless to work. I've opened up my WAP by disabling encryption, and by disabling NIC filtering. But no joy. I enter what I believe is all the correct information into Yast in order to configure the wireless. Is there something else I must do to tell the computer to actually *use* the wifi?

* Sleep (what Linux calls suspend-to-ram) does not work. I can live without this, because suspsend-to-disk works ok, but sleep would be nice to have.

* Power management. Wow! What can I say. It's horrible. I had not one, but *two* batteries connected to my X30 the other evening, I do not believe I even got three hours of use total. I am shocked. Is this the best that I can hope for while running under Linux?

I'm also rather confused by the fact that SuSE seems to have installed not one, but *three* different ways to control power-management features (such as sleep, hibernate, CPU speed). These do not seem well-coordinated. I see the same settings in different places, and, when I change them in one place, they are not reflected in the other. I need to get the exact names for these, but I'm not in front of the right computer at the moment. There is a battery icon on the KDE desktop that opens a panel from which I can control whether I can try to sleep, what happens when I close the lid, etc. There is also a Thinkpad control panel applet which seems to allow me to control the same things. Then there is an obvious alpha version of some other Thinkpad control software. Well, I'll get the precise names and post them later.

My two main concerns right now are battery life and the wireless networking. Is there hope for better power management? Would I be better off trying Linux on something newer, like an X30? Any help getting my wireless working would be appreciated.

Jonathan

[JonathanGennick]

I'm still working to diagnose my lack of wireless under Linux. Below is a sumary of what I've found. I feel tantalizingly close to having a working system, but I'm not quite there, and I don't know why not. Any helpful suggestions will be appreciated.

When I run iwconfig, I see both a wifi0 and a wlan0:

x30:~ # iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

wifi0 IEEE 802.11b ESSID:"Gennick" Nickname:"x30"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: 00:30:BD:62:7B:F5
Bit Rate:11 Mb/s Sensitivity=1/3
Retry min limit:8 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality=28/70 Signal level=-66 dBm Noise level=-94 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

wlan0 IEEE 802.11b ESSID:"Gennick" Nickname:"x30"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: 00:30:BD:62:7B:F5
Bit Rate:11 Mb/s Sensitivity=1/3
Retry min limit:8 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality=28/70 Signal level=-66 dBm Noise level=-94 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

The "Access Point" field in the above report shows the correct, MAC
address for my WAP. It's not clear to me why I see two devices, not
one. A friend who runs Mandrake on a T41 sees only wlan0.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

sit0 no wireless extensions.

Looking more closely at wlan0:

x30:~ # ifconfig wlan0
wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:05:3C:07:21:F8
inet addr:192.168.0.11 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::205:3cff:fe07:21f8/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST NOTRAILERS RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1492 Metric:1
RX packets:229 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:58 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:36322 (35.4 Kb) TX bytes:16348 (15.9 Kb)
Interrupt:11 Memory:e0058000-e0059000

You can see here that I've been given an IP address. That's a good
sign, right?

Yet I cannot contact other machines using their domain names:

x30:~ # ping oreilly.com
ping: unknown host oreilly.com

Nor can I contact other machines using their IP addresses:

x30:~ # ping 208.201.239.36
connect: Network is unreachable

I cannot even ping my router:

x30:~ # ping 192.168.0.1
PING 192.168.0.1 (192.168.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
[[ctrl-C done in here]]
--- 192.168.0.1 ping statistics ---
2 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 999ms

And I cannot even ping my access point:

x30:~ # ping 192.168.0.4
PING 192.168.0.4 (192.168.0.4) 56(84) bytes of data.
[[again, I had to ctrl-C out of this]]
--- 192.168.0.4 ping statistics ---
2 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 1000ms

I'm at a complete loss here as to what to do next (reinstall
Windows?). Anyone have any advice?

[JonathanGennick]

I've made progress, which I'd like to report back here, in case it helps someone else. Thanks to some unknown person who calls himself Morpheous, I've figured out that I need to issue the command:

route add default gw 192.168.0.1 wlan0

Then I can ping IP addresses.

Next, hardcoding my nameservers gets me to the point where I can
function using domain names.

I don't know why I must hardcode nameserver addresses when DHCP is
correctly assigning IP addresses. I thought DHCP took care of
nameservers too.

And why must I manually issue the route command to add a default
gateway? I don't understand that one yet. When I configure my wireless
using Yast, I still see the default gateway value of 192.168.0.1 that
I plugged in the other day. That value is getting stored somewhere,
but it's not being used, which is annoying.

Anyway, I've made progress. That's the good thing. I'm encouraged
enough that I may stick with it for awhile.

[Edward Mendelson]

This sounds very frustrating. Wireless works out of the box with SUSE 9.2 and my ThinkPad T42 (Atheros chip). One thing to consider is this:
Make sure that you disable (YaST calls it "delete" but it isn't as permanent as that) any wired ethernet connection before enabling the wireless one.

Also, try going into YaST and turning off the firewall completely. I know that's extreme, but it will let you know if the firewall was the problem.

[JonathanGennick]

Thanks. Someone else also suggested turning off the firewall, and I did that last evening. I should actually reenable it, to see whether things break again.

As for deleting the wired connection, well, I don't want to do that. I run the laptop wired quite often when I'm at my desk. File transfers are faster that way, and, also, my cordless phones tends to interefere with 802.11b. So I want wired when I have wire, and I want wireless to be used when I don't have a wire.

I'm still on the fence a bit about whether to keep Linux on the thing. At first I was all gung ho about. Now, I'm not so sure. It's a tough call.

I have to decide tomorrow, because that's when my new hard-drive arrives, which goes into my laptop so that I can shuffle my current drive to my wife's laptop so I can pass *that* drive on to my daughter (or maybe to myself) for use as a backup drive. Whatever mood I'm in tomorrow, that's probably the operating system I'll end up with

[Edward Mendelson]

Actually, deleting the wired connection takes about two seconds to undo. And I guarantee that you won't be able to use the wireless while the wired connection is also present. However, you don't even need to delete it if you download and install this bit of software, which lets you activate and deactivate wireless/wired connections with a couple of clicks:

http://support.novell.com/products/tech ... 10007.html

The instructions don't quite match the reality of the software, but with a little bit of trouble, you can figure out what's intended. Remember that much of this has to be done as su, not as yourself. But it does work.

[JonathanGennick]

Ed, thanks. Netapplet looks like just the trick.

I've pretty decided to throw Windows back on though, once my new drive arrives. Not because of the networking issues, but for other reasons.