[ale] Dell Latitude - SuSE Install went well

BruceG griffisb at bellsouth.net
Thu Oct 9 14:55:30 EDT 2003


On Thursday 09 October 2003 10:38, griffisb at bellsouth.net wrote:
> Well, got the Dell Latitiude off E-bay, and received it yesterday. Flipped
> a coin (I mean, made an educated decision) on distributions. Decided no
> Mandrake, decided no to Debian after smacking my head against a wall on
> printserver. Don't want to double-smack it doing remote assistance.
> Undecided on Red Hat / Fedora deal. So SuSE it is.
>
> The laptop shipped from DFS with no operating system. Good for me! SuSE
> formatted/partitioned the hard drive, installed cleanly, recognized the
> graphics and sound cards. Recognized the modem. Didn't recognize the
> Ethernet interface until after I rebooted it - so I was nervous for maybe 3
> minutes.
>
> Time to update OpenOffice, GNU-Cash, install Scribus, and make sure the
> Gimp is current. Then gotta mail it to Pittsburgh for my sister. If any of
> you have friends needing a laptop - the refurbed ones from Dell available
> on E-Bay seem pretty cool.
>
> I haven't tested the floppy yet - but think it will work no problem.

Had problems yanking the CD/ROM out of the bay and installing the floppy. 
Didn't "automagically" recognize it. Saw that the floppy shipped with a 
parallel cable. Connected it. No immediate joy. Re=installed SuSE 8.2 
Personal with the CD/ROM in the bay and the floppy attached to the parallel 
port. Worked like a charm.

I'm sure I didn't have to re-install, but that worked for me.



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