I settled on Debian a long time ago and prefer to use it on any and all platforms. However, given the fact that I write about GNU/Linux, I often take a peek at other distributions. Last week I took a look at OpenSUSE, not from a desire to write a review (there are enough slavering "reviews" on the net) but as a brief experiment to get a wireless card working. My comments on the distribution, therefore, should be looked at in that context.

Some background first. I inherited a six-year-old Acer laptop from one of my offspring - but I figure that a P3-600 with 256 meg of RAM certainly has some life left in it. Installing a new operating system on this machine is complicated by the fact that the CD-ROM -a proprietary device from Acer called Easy-Link - has become rather erratic. At times it reads a CD and at others it refuses to do so. There is no pattern to this behaviour - the same CD will be accepted one time and rejected the next. And it makes no difference if the CD is professionally produced or one made at home.  The floppy drive is on the same external hardware as the CD-ROM but, in sharp contrast, is still grinding away.

Thus, installing GNU/Linux on this machine meant looking for a set of floppies which would facilitate a network install. Debian, fortunately, has just such a remedy for machines without a CD-ROM. I came up against another obstacle: while one of the PCMCIA wireless cards which I have (D-Link-G650, using an Atheros chipset) has drivers available for Linux, the other, a Netgear WG511v2, which has a chipset from Marvell Technology, has no Linux drivers. I made the mistake of downloading the floppies for Debian's stable distribution, something I realised a good three months later.

Murphy's Law came into play. The D-Link card, a brand new one, turned out to be defective, the third such card to die. I tried to get it going, using the drivers from the MadWifi project, but after seeing anything from 40 to 90 percent of packets drop out, I gave up. I didn't feel like asking for a replacement as the card was sold to me by a friend - and the last time it was replaced was just a month or two back. Then an accident forced me into bed for a few months. As soon as I was able to hobble around, my first task was to sit down and look at the old laptop afresh. There is a method of using a wrapper plus Windows drivers to get a wireless card working on GNU/Linux and I thought I would explore this path.