I upgraded my operating system to SuSE 10.1
(Open SuSE) with kernel 2.6.16. This was a fairly easy upgrade. Here's a
list of specific issues I found:
- The Xorg version of X-Windows (6.9.0) now has a driver for ATI Radeon
(including our M300 model) that does 3D graphics. (There's also one
for nVidia.) Details here.
- The ATI proprietary graphics driver has continual improvements.
The current version is 8.25.18.
- Suspend to RAM is now working with
the proprietary ATI graphics driver. Yay! I have an empirical test of how
long the battery will last in suspend to RAM state, in the
battery writeup.
- The MMC-SD card driver has not made
it into the mainline kernel, so you still have to compile the driver
yourself.
- The powersave daemon is much improved and no longer sucks a lot of
CPU time. the issue is discussed in this
section.
/etc/init.d/network start modem0 -o manual
will now do the
whole work of starting daemons to manage the modem's PPP connection,
including soliciting the password on the ISP. Obviously this has to be
done manually, unless you have the security consciousness of a planaria
and put your password in the configuration file.
- Formerly subfs was used to handle mounting removeable media. Subfs
was a horrid kludge, imitating the way Windows does mounting, and is now
down the drain. After creating the device inode if necessary, udev
notifies hal (via dbus) when a device becomes ready, hal notifies resmgr
to give the console user permission, and then it notifies the Gnome
Volume Manager (or the KDE equivalent) to actually mount the volume, as
the user. If one has a Gnome Volume Manager. Since I use fvwm, not Gnome,
my volumes don't get mounted. Hiss, boo!