Okay, had a* very* interesting day so far. As so often with Linux, if you start changing too many parameters without being sure of what you’re doing, you’re going to hose your system. Such is what happened to me this morning. But it was worth it. You asked how I installed the system, so this time I took notes! 
To answer an earlier question first, when I got the computer it had Ubuntu 10.10 on it, and that’s when I noticed how poor the graphics were with the on-board graphics card. So the first thing I did was go in my “spare parts” box and dug out the nVidia card and put it in. Not being an Ubuntu user, the next step was installing openSUSE 12.2 from a usb I had just made a few days before. But, back to the chain of events this morning. This is directly from my notes, so it’s kind of terse and point-to-point.
Fresh install of openSUSE 12.2 from the usb.
After choosing default boot entry, there’s no screen until the X display manager login.
Changed boot entry to try and keep on-board card from doing too much by changing splash and quiet to ‘modeset.radeon=0’. The output from cmdline looks like this:
BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-3.4.6-2.10-desktop root=UUID=d2211019-0184-43e8-8175-5d321ea074ef resume=/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3160812AS_5LSAZCNH-part2 modeset.radeon=0 showopts vga=0x31b
Now I can see the boot messages and system smoothly boots to X.
Output from ‘fbset -i’ with newly installed 12.2:
mode "1280x1024"
geometry 1280 1024 1280 1024 32
timings 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
accel true
rgba 8/16,8/8,8/0,0/0
endmode
Frame buffer device information:
Name : nouveaufb
Address : 0xd0013000
Size : 5242880
Type : PACKED PIXELS
Visual : TRUECOLOR
XPanStep : 1
YPanStep : 1
YWrapStep : 0
LineLength : 5120
Accelerator : No
Everything works, switching to console is smooth and text is clear, X works well but is quite slow.
Logged out of X to command console, updated system with ‘zypper dup’, then rebooted. After update everything is the same as after initial install. Next I switched repositories to Tumbleweed, and updated again. Checked system and it’s still the same as after initial install, using nouveau.
Downloaded and installed the nVidia driver installer from nVidia: Rebooted the system and entered runlevel 3, not loading X. Ran the nVidia script and installed the proprietary driver.
The nVidia installer created the necessary blacklist entries for the nouveau driver. It does not add or change entries in ‘/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf’, the documentation states that can be overwritten in an update, so instead it creates it’s own blacklist file ‘nvidia.conf’ which is read by the loader. Per instructions here, (if all else fails, follow instructions!) I used Yast to change ‘NO_KMS_IN_INITRD’ to yes in sysconf. Then used the boot loader editor in Yast and added ‘xdriver=no’ to the command line, changed ‘Graphical’ console to ‘Text’ and rebooted.
Boot entry now:
BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-3.4.6-2.10-desktop root=UUID=d2211019-0184-43e8-8175-5d321ea074ef resume=/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3160812AS_5LSAZCNH-part2 modeset.radeon=0 xdriver=no showopts vga=normal
There’s no longer any framebuffer output, ‘fbset -i’ shows no such file or device. The tty console is now 80X24 so it’s not very attractive, but I only need it for updating the system. Whenever I do an update I like to exit X altogether and run zypper in a console. Not being able to see or read the text in that console is what started me on all this. Like I said, not pretty, but it works. I spend all my time in X anyway, so the once a month or so I update the system, I can live with the console text being so big.
Things I missed the first time was the ‘NO-KMS-IN-INITRD’ in sysconf, and setting the console to text mode so no framebuffer gets loaded. I’ve put the output now from ‘dmesg’ here, as you can see there’s no longer any warning about not having a console driver from the nVidia driver. I still have to go in and blacklist the radeonfb and radeon drivers in ‘/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf’ but they don’t seem to be affecting anything so I may not bother.
I really, REALLY appreciate all your help on this Tyler, it’s kept me from getting too frustrated and taking a hammer to this box. If you have other questions or want more info, let me know. For now I’m going to say this problem is solved. Hopefully someone else will find it helpful and keep them from pulling their hair out.
I have some further questions instead: