Saturday, July 18, 2009

SLED 11 on my HP 2140 - making it work!

I decided to install SLED 11 (once again) onto my HP 2140 last night. I was watching an interesting documentary on WW1 and was replying to some tweets. Suddenly the machine froze and just wouldn't work and the screen started to flicker (totally like a blinking idiot!).

A hard reboot and a couple of more times of doing various things and the same freeze and flickering....urgghh.

I knew I shouldn't have mucked around with openSUSE Build Service repos...aiya. I searched the whole apartment and couldn't find a working openSUSE 11.1 DVD (the Live CD won't do due to some weird X issues).

Found the SLED 11 DVD, should I? No Fedora 11 DVD as well; ah what the heck, took the plunge, registered with my previous key and updated the netbook via Ethernet cable to the WiMAX router.

Some one hour later, added the Packman repo for openSUSE 11.1 and walla, got the broadcom-wl and codec packages. Sweet....

Although the packages are a little "dated" in comparison to openSUSE 11.1 and Fedora 11; SLED 11 seems to work better than when I was running openSUSE 11.1. SLED 11 picked up all my hardware and does hibernation as well. The video playback is smoother and has lesser artifacts when I move my cursor over the playback screen. Though the boot-up seems slower in comparison. Impressive nevertheless.

Should I take the plunge and fork out some serious dough for a Linux distro? Hmm...let me just run it for a couple of weeks and then I'll decide.

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