Questions about Suse&Ubuntu

I am deciding between SuSe and Ubuntu Studio 7.10. First, do they both support geforce 8600m GT? And do they both support wifi out of the box (intel pro 3945 wifi card is what I have on my laptop).

 

>> nVidia has provided a driver for them. You may have to install this by yourself though.

>> For ubuntu, I am not sure that this is restricted driver or not. If so, you just have to download through a wizard after finishing. In this case, it's almost out of the box.

For openSUSE, it is ready out-of-the-box.

 

yes they do support it...see my sig....btw, install Ubuntu (regular)...you can add all the Studio stuff with a command line

 

ubuntu will enable nvidia and the 3945 through the restricted drivers manager. iwl3945 is included in ubuntu. just go through the restricted drivers manager, enable the wifi, connected to the internet, install the nvidia package(s) then enable the nvidia. i don't recall the order of events (you may need to update your repos and cache) but it's pretty painless. to verify, you can 'glxinfo | grep rendering' and 'glxinfo | grep vendor' which should state yes and nvidia, respectively. you can check lsmod for iwl3945. iwl3945 does not need to be added to your modules file.

 

So I installed SuSe 10.3, everything works except sound. It detected the Compal HDA sound, but it doesn't work. Anyone know how to fix it? I am gonna update everything and see if it helps.

Edit: No luck. I'm on it right now, and if only sound worked I'd ditch XP lol. I really don't know the problem, the video card wasn't working 3D so I uninstalled then reinstalled, so sound is the only problem. No updates fixed it, found something of interest when dmesg'ed.

Seems it can't find the right codec or something.

 

edit: just saw your edit. i'd browse around here:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/alsa-driver/+bug/116326

and here

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-506678.html

 

I don't think the Compal IFL90 is old...

 

His joke was that with his version of Ubuntu he's in 2010... (10.3 would be March, 2010.)

 

10.3? Do you mean SUSE?

Well, I know SUSE's ALSA is bit old. That being said, have you tried giving options to intel-HDA drivers? How to do this depend on distros. Anyway, I am using model=vaio and position_fix=0, and it works perfect on my FZ. Obviously you want to try different models. You can find the list of available models here. Since the link below is for Sabayon, you will need to take different steps for actually implementing "model" - assuming you are on SUSE, you can use YaST.

http://wiki.sabayonlinux.org/index.php?title=HOWTO:_Resolve_Problems_with_HDA-Intel_Sound_Cards

 

This guy was able to get Alsa sound working on his IFL90, with the 1.0.15-rc3 version of alsa, and by using the following alsa configuration options line;

options snd-hda-intel model=toshiba

Good Luck..

 

Yea I meant Suse 10.3, I fixed that my bad. I don't think I should try any of those guides that are for ubuntu, or should I?

 

I own two laptops. On one I have Ubuntu 7.10 and the other opensuse 10.3. For my work (scientist) opensuse is completely superior. Plus the fonts totally kick ass. Ubuntu is a very user/newbie friendly operating system that is better for multimedia and other fun stuff.

 

opensuse all the way.

You can try using the ubuntu forums for help. Sometimes it overlaps, especially if you use the gnome version of suse 10.3 (ubuntu uses gnome too)

I'm a kde man myself, but sometimes the solutions aren't all that specific to the environment.

 

Some things are same across all distros - for example, they all use alsa, and they all use the same hda-intel driver. However, some things are different depending on distros. For example, where you put a command with model=toshiba (or whatever) line at - so you will want to consult a documentation for your distro about that.

 

the Ubuntu 8.04 beta works just fine on my Compal IFL90. Give it a try. Alsa has been updated so that you don't have to fix that no sound bug by hand anymore.