I got my free SUSE goodies from Novell a few weeks ago and thought I'd 
load it up on the laptop I'm taking to Defcon. I've gotta ask... WTF is 
up with YAST and networking?  Is it *really* completely freaking broken 
but nobody talks about it? That's hard to believe...

Here's what happened. I popped in the SUSE Pro 9.1 DVD and started the 
install. During the detect stage it paused for a few moments and then 
correctly identified the box as a 'Toshiba Satellite Pro 4600' - hot 
dang! I won't have to dork around selecting hardware 'cause it already 
knows about it!  Well, no. Not really.

It was just grand with everything except networking. It identified the 
Intel Pro 100 and the internal Toshiba wireless card (and on later 
installs a Cisco Aironet 350 as well) but no amount of coaxing would get 
either to work. With the Pro100, I watched with tcpdump as it sent happy 
little ARP requests inquiring about the gateway (and got nice, happy 
replies), but that's the closest it got to actually communicating - 
after 3 installs in all, Just In Case.

Minor nuisance, I thought - I'll just burn the SUSE Pro 8.1 images onto 
disks and install that. Surely they've got the bugs out of that one, eh?

Wrong-o. Same story, except it wasn't quite as pretty and didn't 
identify the hardware by name. Nice clean install followed by no network 
no matter how I coaxed it.

Next, I popped in a Redhat 9 CD. Again, nice clean install... and, 
wonder of wonders: all the network stuff Just Works. I didn't even have 
to say please.

I saw a mention in the SUSE 9.1 release notes that they can't ship 
firmware for wireless cards for some reason. OK, I'll cut em slack on 
that. But really, what's up with the Intel Pro 100?  (I did quite a bit 
of googling too, btw) I'd still like to run SUSE to get used to it if I 
can get it to talk on a network. Anyone know the Magic Word required for 
that to happen? Maybe a totally paranoid Deny Absolutely Everything 
firewall ruleset? I didn't check for that...

TIA,
Steve

btw, Anyone else heading to Vegas?

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