How can I switch back from the nvidia to the nouveau driver? There are a lot of changes to be made!
Running OpenSUSE 13.1 on HP Pavilion laptop
If you installed the drivers using the rpm packages it should be straight forward just removing these and also xorg.conf.
Bo
Thanks! At this moment I managed to install the nvidia driver on the 3.12 kernel. But this kind of problems after an upgrade is quite annoying. If this can be avoided by using the nouveau driver, I will do it next time.
Well, it is mandatory to recompile 3rd party kernel modules after every kernel update.
If you install the nvidia driver from the repo (via the RPM packages), it won’t be necessary normally.
But in this case this was a major (incompatible) update, so it was necessary to rebuild the kernel module/reinstall the driver.
The Evergreen decided to switch to the 3.12 kernel that’s used in SLE12 to not having to maintain their own kernel.
nouveau is included in the kernel package itself, so it should always work.
But you need to remove the nvidia driver to use it, as the packages blacklist nouveau.
The strange thing is that a symbolic link is installed with the 3.12 kernel modules which points to the 3.6 kernel modules on my computer. The real file is in the 3.6 modules. I would have expected that the new kernel module would have been placed with the 3.12 modules and that the older links and file would have remained untouched. But even then there would probably have been a problem with newer lib-files and an older kernel module.
3.6?
Isn’t it rather 3.11.6? 
I would have expected that the new kernel module would have been placed with the 3.12 modules and that the older links and file would have remained untouched.
No, that’s not how the nvidia rpm packages work.
They install to the directory of the standard kernel originally shipped with the corresponding openSUSE version (3.11.6 in your case), and create symlinks for all other installed kernels. Those symlinks will also be created automatically whenever a new kernel is installed (i.e. when there is a kernel update), so the module is available there too.
Normally this works fine, but in this case the kernel has been upgraded to an incompatible version (3.12) as mentioned, so the old modules for 3.11 don’t work any more.