Desktop effects are not enabled and in system settings there is the following message
“Desktop effects are not available on this system due to the following technical issues: Required X extensions (XComposite and XDamage) are not available.”
The nouveau driver is installed.
Peering at /etc/X11/xorg.conf I get three pieces of information
I tried Xorg -configure and tested the result as it prompts, but that file seemed to contain errors
I can’t find anything in YaST to edit the file
Apart from backing up xorg.conf (which I have) and firing up a text editor to change “off” to “on” does anyone have any more intelligent suggestions?
krusader has a root mode menu entry for editing files…
Thank you for replying, however, krusader appears to be a file manager, (never used it) and I’d use vi anyway.
The warning at the start of the file suggests that hand editing is a bad idea and I can’t find ISaX (even with “whereis”)
I had the same issue… I have read that 3d accelration was not available (for now with nouveau).
I did three little things :
download the nvidia driver from here : ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86 (choose then your architecture) and copy it to the /root directory on your machine.
install the kernel mandatory kernel sources for building modules (zypper in kernel-dektop-devel or kernel-default-devel)
install gcc (zypper in gcc)
reboot your machine and set nomodeset on the command line kernel parameter (you will have to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst with YaST to make this change permanent)
do not login to your dektop, press the alt+F1 keys and open a root session.
shutdown the X server :
#init 3
chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux-YOUR_ARCHITECTURE-256.35.run
#./NVIDIA-Linux-YOUR_ARCHITECTURE-256.35.run
follow the on screen instructions
init 5
you will see the nVidia Logo appear
login in to your system
the compositing will be activated 
The bad side effect is that you will have to do this each time you update your kernel… (it takes only a couple of minutes)