I decided to give a new OpenSUSE 11.2 a spin. In hindsight, that was probably a mistake.
The new version installs a desktop-optimized kernel. The idea sounds good, but for me it does not work: named consistently causes an Oops or a kernel panic. (I haven’t otherwise had a kernel panic for many, many years!) I reverted to the so-called “default” kernel and the system seems to suffer only a loss of my confidence.
Somewhat more worrisome is that the system seems to have no bladder^Wfan control. The fan remains off until the temperature reaches crazy levels. Then the fan turns on full-blast and remains on until shutdown. In the same department, the backlight controls do not work. The tricks that worked in 11.1 no longer do. I am going to try a bios upgrade and see if things improve.
Ideas, anyone? This is a Toshiba Satellite L305-S5944. Drop me a line at mwelinder at gmail.
Update: I really don’t think 11.2 likes me:
- Emacs’ menus are partially broken. For example, in Dired the menus for Mark/Regexp/Immediate/Subdir are all empty.
- Valgrind is broken. I get incomplete stack traces for places with full debug info. I get complaints about unrecognized syscalls.
- The source repository doesn’t seem to be set up right.
But, hey!, it comes with wobbly windows. What more can anyone want?