and not Debian. I'm almost expecting to be thrashed for it here, but anyone who objects can officially bite me. :) I had a pretty good reason for doing so.

I initially wanted to use Knoppix, but after reading through the install faq that was linked here, I realized that if I did something wrong, the only machine I currently have connected to the internet would be down, and I'd have to ask all my support questions at work. Scratch that. I've loaded and played around with Knoppix on my laptop before, and it works just fine, more or less, but it doesn't recognize my PCMCIA cards so I don't actually have any dialup or network access. (I won't bother mentioning the built-in winmodem, because, well, it's just a freaking appendix as far as I'm concerned. The only thing it's good for is taking up space).

I thought about doing a Debian network install, but DSL isn't hooked up till next week, so I figured, what the hell, and bought SuSE 8.2 professional. And, all things considered, I'm pretty glad I did.

I'm a bit annoyed that I'm still using rpms, but I have to say that as far as configuration software goes, SuSE did a great job with Yast2. It's always been a pretty useful tool, but now it's even comprehensible to people with short attention spans (like me). And because various parts of my thinkpad (specifically, the sound card and the PCMCIA slots) were a bit tricky to deal with, that helped.

I'd also like to say this is the first time a distro's "help system" has ever been of any use to me. Searchable, too... the help system is what made it possible to get my PCMCIA services up and going. And the written documentation is what made it possible to get my sound card working (though not working consistently -- I'm going to have to check the net for specifics concerning that).

apt-get is a great tool if you're actually hooked up to the internet in a reliable manner... since I wasn't, I appreciated the 6 cd's of applications.

At any rate, other than the fact that my laptop is showing its age and giving me arcane bios error messages at bootup (requiring me to power down and restart two or three times before it will actually start the whole boot process), the whole thing went relatively well.

... and it seems to work -- although every time I reboot, I get sound everywhere except when I start up "Civilization: Call to Power" -- I have to run alsaconf *again* to get it to work there. Not sure why, like I said, it works fine everywhere else.

Uses Crystal drivers, 4236 if I remember the number correctly.