I installed OpenSUSE 13.1 last night, having finally seen that the Nvidia drivers are ready to be installed along with the repository or one-click.
My hardware is an I5 cpu, Nvidia GTX 550 ti graphics card and 8 GiB’s memory. I installed with the btrfs file system for root. I note that the install preserved my home directory that had been on the computer previously but, quite properly, the OpenSUSE settings for the appearance of the desktop were all normal. The prior installation was an ubuntu based Distro.
I ended up installing OpenSUSE twice. I hope to avoid what happened the first time, so I am posting that event. The first time, I had the software update during installation. Thereafter, I installed the Nvidia driver via one-click. I chose the correct one-click for my graphics card (i.e., for GeForce 8 and later - the correct driver is the 331.20 driver) and installed it but when I went to restart using restart via Kickoff, nothing happened. After waiting a bit, I restarted the computer manually. After KDE’s splash page, the computer did not load a desktop but only a blank screen.
I restarted manually and booted via the low graphics version, which brought me to a desktop but one that did not properly recognize my screen resolution. In any event, I rebooted normally but without doing anything else. This time, I reached a terminal. I tried - but was not sure what to do - to start X, which is what I would have done in Arch. That got me nowhere. I decided, because this was a fresh install, that it made sense merely to reinstall OpenSUSE.
This time around, I did not update during installation but waited until the system was installed. Again, my home directory was preserved and, like before, the OpenSUSE’s settings for the appearance of the desktop loaded properly. I hope this time not to run into problems installing the Nvidia drivers. I was able to reboot normally, via the Kickoff launcher. This evening, I plan to add the repository, this time, “The Repository Way.” If, after doing so, the driver does not install correctly, how does one go about correcting things via terminal?
One point. I note, looking in the autostart programs via KDE’s system settings program that Nvidia is set to load. Should I untick this setting, given that the Nvidia driver is not installed yet? Also, is there a possibility that such setting or something else in my home partition - which was based on a ubuntu style system - interfered or will interfere with correctly loading the Nvidia driver, once I again install it. I note that I had, prior to OpenSUSE, saved a Nvidia (and I am not sure of the correct name for it) profile. Perhaps, that profile was loaded and is inconsistent with something in OpenSUSE.
Please note that I am following up on a pre-installation post here. I hope I have not run afoul of the posting rules.