[tlug] Two Quick Questions

["Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon" <ronfaxon@example.com>]

A friend was given an HP Pavilion 2150 from another friend (who gave it 
up for dead when W-ME crumbled) and I'm in the middle of setting it up 
for him.  To make it easier for him to help his girlfriend who sends him 
MS-PowerPoint files that don't fully open properly in OpenOffice, the 
first thing I did was to use the product recover disks (that had been 
unopened! The previous owner didn't even *try* to fix it) to put in a 
clean version of (cough, chock, cough-cough) bloody W-ME (to be dual 
booted with Linux).  No problem with that, and enough background info - 
now on to my questions.


1) Are LAN cards easily interchangeable?

As it doesn't have on-board LAN, I plugged in a laptop LAN card in the 
front PCMIA slot (it's a desktop machine, but it has a pair of PCMIA 
slots on the front panel) and I'm about to put in SuSE 9.3, but will it 
be troublesome to set it up with one LAN card and then plug in a 
different LAN card?  I'm using one from one of my laptops now and am 
going to have my friend buy his own card.  Hopefully it's just adopt the 
new card without trouble.....


2) Will SuSE 9.3 install on only 128MB?

9.0 did....  I would like to increase the memory, but haven't been able 
to get into the bloody machine yet.  Another good thing about Dell - 
whose desktop computers can nearly always be easily opened - by 
contrast, this bloody HP has those bloody plastic covers that slide into 
automatically locking slots in the hidden metal casing.  How the h**l do 
you get those d**n things off without breaking them?  Theoretically, it 
should be a simple matter of pushing and sliding, but they're not coming 
off.  (I know what type it is, as the guy tossed it in a cloth bag and 
had it shipped to me and one of them had come lose in transit... I 
looked at how it fit together, lined up the slots and slid it back 
together - "click" went the locking plastic tabs, "oh sh*t!" said I, as 
I realized that I should have left that d**m plastic cover off.)

Lyle