New Installation 11.4 --- Whay No Desktop Showing?

Hey all,

So I just recently, for a friend, was trying to fix an old computer of his (2003ish) running Windows XP (Professional I think?).
But the hard drive on the machine was defiantly on its way out. And since he didn’t have the XP Disk I tried installing OpenSuSE 11.4 32-bit i586
on that HD 1st but could never get all the way through the install. So I took another hard drive from an old laptop I had and replaced it with the
one that was in his laptop already.

Laptop Specs: (from manual pdf at hp.com)
**Model: **hp Pavilion ze4400
**Processor: **AMD Athlon (1.47-, 1.53-, 1.67-, 1.8-, 2.2-, and 2.0-GHz)
**Memory: **Up to 1 GB (1024 MB) SDRAM using 512-MB modules.
**Display: **15.0-inch XGA (1024 × 768) or 14.1-inch XGA (1024 × 768) active-matrix TFT
**Video: **ATI Mobility Radeon graphics accelerator with 16, 32, or 64 MB UMA graphics memory,
4x AGP graphics capability
**OS: **Windows XP Professional or Home preinstalled

The installation went fine. No problems that I could see.
Finally after the installation finished the login screen came up, I logged in and then the only thing on the screen for the next hour was
the “desktop wallpaper” and a mouse pointer with the hour glass thing, no icons no taskbar, nothing. I though it would just take a while
because it was a much older laptop but after about an hour or so nothing came up. I was able to Ctrl-Alt-F1 to a CLI runlevel but could not
get to the desktop.

Anyone know what I could do to make this work?

Thanks in advance,
Matt

On 07/22/2011 04:36 PM, mmartin0926 wrote:

> Anyone know what I could do to make this work?

can you confirm the install disk passed this test:
http://tinyurl.com/2ebcf27 if you didn’t do that, do it now…

also, it could be that that laptop is not capable of running openSUSE
11.4 with either KDE or Gnome, the specs you posted says “up to 1 GB”
RAM and the specs for 11.4 here:
http://en.opensuse.org/Hardware_requirements recommend 1 GB…

on the other hand, i guess it should run either of those desktops, but
slowly…

please look at the log /var/log/messages and see if you see any reports
of problems at and during the time you were waiting …you can do that
from the command line with


sudo cat /var/log/messages | less

and then you can scroll up and down…to the TIME of the problem…use
‘q’ to quit…and tell us what you found…


DD
Caveat-Hardware-Software
openSUSE®, the “German Engineered Automobiles” of operating systems!

Hey Denver D,

Thanks for the quick response!!!
I’m at work right now, but I will give all that a shot as soon as I get home.

Thanks,
Matt

So I found out why their was no desktop loading…

Whoever had given my friend the laptop must have stripped it of most of it’s RAM before they gave it to him. I decided to open it up and see how much memory was really in there. LOL there was only about 256MB of RAM in there. That explains alot…

I will see if he wants to buy RAM for it and if he does I will post back and let you know what happens.

Thanks for your help,
Matt