After installing the Geforce 6+ drivers from this page for my Geforce Go 7300 card on my Acer Aspire 5630 laptop, I am no longer able to log in. Every time openSUSE starts, it freezes while the big blue K is appearing in the login sequence screen. The exact same thing happened when I tried to install the nVidia drivers in Kubuntu on the same laptop a few days ago, so it would seem the fault is not with the distro itself but the driver or KDE. Does anybody have any suggestions to resolve the situation, so the nVidia drivers can work under openSUSE 12.1?
This may be an issue with KDE4.6/7 + older nvidia cards. I had the same problem with GeForce a 7200SE. The desktop actually starts (you hear the startup sound/music), but the screen won’t render. Solutions/workarounds vary among disabling compositing (by editing one of kde config files), downgrading the nvidia driver to version 260, messing with qt repos and even installing dejavu fonts (! - saw that in an arch linux forum). If you think this may help take a look here. That was under oS 11.3 and 11.4 64-bit.
Thanks very much for the reply. That does sound right, since I do hear the startup music like you say, but it all freezes up before the desktop is rendered. It sounds like downgradig the nvidia driver to 260 is a sensible option, but I’m so far unable to get to a desktop to follow the instructions on the linked post. The failsafe just presents me with a command prompt, and I so far haven’t been able to find any instructions to revert to the open source drivers from the terminal. Hopefully if I can do that, I’ll be able to install the nvidia 260 driver, so if anybody can point me in the direction of how to revert to get back to a working desktop from the command line that would be great!
In the terminal screen log as root and type yast2 <enter>. You’ll get the text (ncurses) version of yast from where you can do everything you do from the GUI version. IMO ncurses Yast is one of the things that set openSUSE apart from other distros.
And while you’re at it, consider installing midnight commander (mc), an excellent text-mode dual-panel file manager/text editor similar to the old Norton commander of DOS fame. It’s MUCH easier to use than command line stuff to move/delete/edit files.
Thanks for the advice. I’m not too familiar with the command line so far, but when I’ve got a bit more time next week I’ll read up on yast’s commands and see if I can install the earlier version of the nvidia drivers from failsafe mode. I’ll definitely use the midnight commander text editor too!
