Suse drivers with OpenSuse?

Linux is FREE

for some, such as Canonical, it is (barely) free beer

for others, such as Novell / SuSE or HP, it is free speech.

all the Linux drivers for HP EliteBook 8760w Mobile Workstation ( http://h20565.www2.hp.com/portal/site/hpsc/templat... )

are old versions of the drivers you can download either from openSUSE (e.g.yast2-sound rpm) or from hardware manufacturer (e.g. NVidia, AMD-ATI aso.)

the packages are marked for SuSE Enterprise thus will not be picked up by yast / zypper on openSUSE but there are always "open" versions available instead - what the SuSE one's are based upon.

See the OpenSUSE hardware compatibility portal:

http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Hardware

Although each version of SUSE Enterprise is based on a version of OpenSUSE, this does not imply that drivers are compatible. You may want to reinstall and register SLED (see below), or try OpenSUSE and contact OpenSUSE techcnical support (see below), or install another Linux distribution, for example Linux Mint.

> what are the difference between SUSE Linux Enterprise and OpenSUSE?

Please note that you had SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) while there's another flavor called SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). They share the same core.

There's plenty of forum discussions on the Internet, just Google for "SLED vs OpenSUSE".

SUSE Linux Enterprise gets paid technical support (updates and phone support to customers). Within an evaluation 90-day period, you buy a subscription. It is mainly targeted as businesses. It has fewer software (e.g. SLED has no web server), but this may not be of interest to "the typical user", depending on his/her needs.

OpenSUSE gets gratis community support (i.e. from OpenSUSE developers and users) for all its lifetime. Support is available at http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Support It has a larger collection of software, but again, the extent to which this matters varies greatly, depending on the users's needs.

SUSE Enterprise is supported for 3 years. The OpenSUSE Evergreen versions are supported for 3 years ( http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Evergreen ) while the other OpenSUSE versions are supported for 18 months. The next OpenSUSE Evergreen is 13.1, which will be available from 20 November 2013, so this is your best option (the newer the release, the higher the probability that hardware and drivers work).

You may install SLED free of charge, it will receive 90 days of updates, and you can extend this to 1 or 3 years by registering with HP:

http://www.novell.com/support/kb/doc.php?id=700279...

The guide is about SLED 10, which you can ypgrade to SLED 11 with the following guide: http://www.novell.com/support/kb/doc.php?id=701020...

You may even try a different Linux distribution, as long as hardware works and/or you can find the drivers for that distro. For example, Linux Mint. In general, the drivers do not HAVE to come from the manufacturer's website. While HP ensures that they will work for SUSE, they say nothing about other distros. Hardware may work out-of-the-box, or there could be a simple dialog that searches for the drivers automatically, or you may need to do it by hand, depending on many factors. However, settings up the drivers by hand is typically a longer and tougher process.