Medion MD96360 on openSUSE 10.3


Sandra got a brand new laptop before Christmas - a stylish shiny Medion in black with swaroski studs on the front panel. Niiice... Anyhow, she didn't particulary want the Windows Vista Home Premium which came with it, so I happily clicked on "Hell no - I don't agree with this EULA" and popped in the openSUSE 10.3 GM 64 bit DVD.

Installing openSUSE 10.3 is ... well ... dead easy. In fact, since 10.1, I haven't really had any problems with openSUSE - now and again there are some quirky hardware parts which just don't work (tm) but nothing that has particulary bothered me. With this laptop, X wasn't detected properly and I got dropped back into the terminal. Installing the fglrx driver solved this (except for an annoying little problem which pops up now and again - more on this later). I was happy to see stuff like the inbuilt card readers working. Ouch - one more thing, now that I think of it - WLAN was a bitch to configure - I still haven't got it working properly - though the inbuilt Ralink r73 card was detected and can be used with iwconfig/iwlist - it seems to have problems with wpa2 authentication. A USB WLAN stick later and WLAN was working... though this really isn't the proper solution...

Anyhow, those were just a few thoughts on the laptop - the overall verdict is "niiice". Small, light, comfortable to type and wickedly fast. More to come on this...