In light of my new found love for Realtek, here's a list of the hardware that's still an issue for me in my new laptop:

• ipw3945 WiFi adaptor
  Mostly working, provided I don't try to make my WAP support 802.11b as well as g. See Novell bug #202619.
• Integrated SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro reader
  This is a Ricoh R5C822/R5C592 host adapter. The module to support this was merged with the main kernel tree starting with 2.6.17-rc1 and versions from 2.6.18-rc1 onwards contain a rewrite the followed a major audit of the code following the release of the specification of the interface. This means it should work with Factory/10.2.
• Internal modem
  Who cares?
• The various 'special' buttons around the keyboard
  See the modem comment

This morning, I emailed Realtek's NIC support line to ask about the Linux driver they offer for download for the 8168 NIC in my laptop. It's a source-code download (nice one) but it has never compiled on SUSE (not so nice one).

Having sent the email, I went out, had some lunch and did some shopping. I returned to a reply from one of Realtek's Tech Support guys. It wasn't the standard "thank you for your email, we're looking into it" email either, it had a tarball of the latest beta version of the driver attached. This update had clearly (based on the changelog) been produced as a result of my email. Best of all, it worked. I built the module and installed it. Then I fired up YaST and was able to configure it.

Now, to try and determine the license, line 98 of r1000_n.c reads

MODULE_LICENSE("GPL");