openSUSE Linux 11.0

I've been using openSUSE Linux 10.3 for a while now. I briefly tried openSUSE 11.0 not long after it came out, but I wasn't convinced that it was stable enough, so I reverted to 10.3. Recently, however, I bought a Mogo Presenter Mouse X54, which is a Bluetooth mouse that slots neatly into the Express Card slot of my HP Pavilion dv2058ea laptop. My thinking was that it should be easy, in this day and age, to get a Bluetooth mouse working with Linux.

At first, I thought I had it working with openSUSE 10.3. It detected the mouse, but I couldn't get it to connect properly. After a bit of Web research, it seemed I probably needed to upgrade the Bluetooth stack, so I downloaded the necessary updates from openSUSE's “GNOME:Community” repository. However, it only seemed to get worse, I couldn't see the mouse at all. In fact, I couldn't detect my laptop's Bluetooth hardware either, so things seemed to be going from bad to worse.

Anyway, I decided to upgrade to 11.0, which promised working Bluetooth connectivity. 11.1 will be out soon, so it seemed reasonable to assume that 11.0 was reasonably stable now. At it turned out, it was a painless upgrade, and my Bluetooth mouse does work now! There was a trick, though. The Bluetooth adapter doesn't seem to start if you have the wireless switch set to the “ on” position when you boot up. You need to switch it on, or off-and-on, after you have logged in.

I do have one issue with 11.0, though. I now have no sound, which means no working Skype. I'm hoping I can resolve this sooner rather than later. Otherwise, I'm happy. Let's hope I can get the sound thing working, though!