Yay. I’m about to go and get some sleep, but just quickly post­ing to say that the changeover was rel­a­tively pain­less and all is well-ish.

I now have full Exchange func­tion­al­ity within Ximian Evo­lu­tion, which was a major fac­tor behind my deci­sion to move to SuSE (i.e. because of their close ties to Nov­ell) over any other plat­form. ALSA audio is now hap­pen­ing as well, although it took a wee spot of hax0ring before it got over the fact that I had two sound­cards, one of which doesn’t really work — it was clip­ping and stut­ter­ing all over the place… well. No. It wasn’t *solely* hav­ing two sound­cards. It was inci­den­tal that the prob­lem went away when I deleted the dodgy one from the sys­tem (YaST2 is lovely) — but it recurred later, even though the card was the­o­ret­i­cally disabled.

The fix? I had to dis­able “IEC958 Mix Ana­log” using KMix, and sud­denly all was golden again. No, I have no idea what that is meant to do. See­ing it was clip­ping all over the place, “IEC958 +5V” would seem a more prob­a­ble choice, but hey, trial and error works mir­a­cles. For the pur­pose of peo­ple Googling this prob­lem, my sound­card is a C-Media PCI CMI8738 and my onboard audio was (before I cooked it sev­eral months ago — it still detects, because I haven’t dis­abled it in the BIOS yet) recog­nised by SuSE 9.1 as a Giga­byte GA-7VAX Onboard Audio (Real­tek ALC650) device.

It’s not bla­tant hit-generation tech­niques, I was just unable to find any­thing about my sound­card and clip­ping with ALSA/SuSE9.1 when I was look­ing before.

Any­way. That was one of sev­eral prob­lems of sig­nif­i­cance I had… other weird ones are to do with print­ers! My good­ness! Okay, so I have this behe­moth HP Office­Jet MFD thingo which scans and prints (and faxes, but I haven’t risked set­ting up the com­puter to inter­face with THAT yet). Detects fine. Doesn’t do ANYTHING until I down­load and re-compile the hpoj dri­vers — once that hap­pens, at least CUPS will detect the printer (pre­vi­ously, only YaST2 and all its spe­cial­ness could see that it was attached)!

Twenty min­utes later, I’ve installed the printer (again, this time with­out the “assis­tance” of YaST), and XSane is work­ing its mar­vels. Just because it was handy, I grabbed a nice scan of the cover of “The DaVinci Code” — full colour, 300dpi, noth­ing had any prob­lems. Okay, so at least ONE direc­tion of our USB is work­ing great. For the first time since installing SuSE, I actu­ally did the oblig­a­tory poke-around-the-startbar-equivalent-menu thing… and uncov­ered this: Sys­tem → Mon­i­tor → HP Office Jet.

Which shows what the two-line LCD on the printer is cur­rently dis­play­ing. And that, of course, worked per­fectly. YET I STILL CANNOT PRINT!!!!

Doh!

If any­one knows whether hpoj would affect scan­ning abil­ity, please say some­thing — if it is com­pletely unre­lated, then I can safely assume that hpoj is borked and needs to be poked with sticks. If it *does* have a con­nec­tion with scan­ning, then the plot has thickened!

Hmm. So much for quickly post­ing. Meh!