So much for Novell's claims that its SuSE 10.2 is supported "out of the box" on Thinkpads (T60p).

ITS JUST NOT TRUE.

My first problem is with the graphics card driver.
For some odd ball reason it doesn't seem to work right at 1600x1200 with full 32bit.
Even so it seemed to work when I tested that configuration in YaST, ever since I made that change I can no longer boot to root, as the system will hang (log on sound repeats in endless cycle) as soon as I start to log on as root and the desktop is supposed to launch.
I can now only log on a normal user with a lower resolution and bit depth.

And to get even that far I had to download another driver from ATI's web site
WHICH WILL NOT INSTALL BECAUSE OF KERNEL VERSION MISMATCHES but which does come with a configuration program "aticonfig" that one must run with the "-initial" option to init the faulty X-Server config file left by the install program.

Lenovo's driver won't install either, because of missing dependancies.


But my biggest problem is that none of the NIC cards will work.
They both (Wired & Wireless) do show up OK in YaST, with all the right names and even the hardware overview and the bootup log shows the WiFi driver as being loaded and operational.

But the Network Interfaces overview only shows the loopback interface, as does "ifconfig".
I spend the whole damn night trying to get any network interface to work, even trying to "fake it" by using a static IP definition for my WiFi - but still no working IP interface shows up afterwards and my WiFi LED stays dimm (the bluetooth is on, but what good does that do me?).

W/o the Internet connection working, I can't get my drivers updated and hope to resolve my ATI mess in the process. Even worse, I can't use my SuSE box for anything but playing Solitaire

None of the Intel drivers will compile on 10.2, because of missing dependencies and now I even messed up my IEEE setup, when I tried to install the latest version of that (as those Intel drivers demand).
That version didn't compile because of missing dependancies as well, but left traces of itself, so that now whenever I use "make" on the Intel drivers they report back that my kernel IEEE symbols differ from the rest of the system and that must be because I obviously failed to install a differing IEEE version (their error message actually says that!).

I re-installed all packages from my SuSE distro, but still get that message about IEEE symbol mismatches.

Sounds to me like I'm screwed for good.
Anybody any good ideas?!