[TriLUG] New notebook woes

[Robert Floyd]

I hope the folks here can lend a hand, or, at least, an opinion or two.
I took advantage of the sales tax holiday to replace my rusting laptop
with a state-of-the-art model (HP Pavilion ze5470). Unfortunately, it
may have been a little TOO state-of-the-art for Linux (SuSe 8.2). It has
an internal wireless card; sadly, it's 802.11g from Broadcom, which, I
understand means it's rather unlikely I'll be using it under Linux any
time soon. Thank goodness I kept my old wireless PCMCIA card.

Of greater concern is getting power management working. I get the ususal
partial ACPI message when I try to do anything with it, so I figured I
would simply add acpi=off apm=on to the boot parameters. This is what
got APM working on my old laptop. On this one, however, when I do this,
the boot process locks up when it gets to the hotswapping devices piece.
Does anyone have a suggestion to help me identify what's going wrong
here?

The other problem (more an annoyance, really) is that the internal
Ethernet connection is not getting recognized on boot up. eth0 and eth1
both fail initialization. When I get logged on, I go into Yast and touch
the network card section to get network services initialized. That
brings the network online. I'm sure there's a simple fix for this and
that the folks here can contribute to my education.

TIA,
Robert Floyd
Durham, NC