OpenSUSE LEAP - Bumpy RIde On New Install

No this is not a request for help, just some comments and if anyone has posted this info before in the technical section, yes and if I was technically inclined that is where this would be posted. Now that everyone is scratching their heads going W.T.H? here is an explanation:

Having given Windows 7 and Windows 10 a fair shot for the last five years, I decided to return to Linux fully. Actually I was going to do a dual boot but, I screwed up the partitioning in Windows, took it as a sign and went, oh well, time to say bu bye to Windows. I have all my data backed up on another hard drive so losing my data on the main drive was no biggy. I did my install using a net iso disk and let it install overnight. I set up a user before hitting the hay and I requested for the computer to just log on in on starting. When I checked things over this morning, I was a bit surprised to find my computer sitting at the login. Oh well, I entered my password and hit enter, only to get booted out again to the login screen. I tried all the choices to no avail and thought, hmm, this is no good. I killed X and logged in there and there I was, logged in but no pretty interface.

What to do, what to do? I suspected it might be because there was no driver for my nVidia card so I went googling on a laptop as to figure out how to install the driver. I found all sorts of information on how to install it using a graphical interface but nothing as far as a text only install. I decided to start yast, as that seemed the most logical step and did figure out how to add the nvidia repository as well as the packman one (It seemed a good idea at the time). I have never used yast as a text only program so it was a panic mode only attempt. I couldn’t figure out how to go from there so I closed out yast, at least I had the two repositories installed, Yay!

I decided to go for broke, nothing to lose at this point. apt-get install nvidia did nothing (yes I hear you laughing and you are allowed to do so). Lets try something bold: apt-get dist-upgrade; enter. Well some 500 megs later, and a good half an hour of unpacking this, that and the other thing, the terminal prompt returned. No sense trying to get X up from here as I would just get told it was already running so reboot. Five minutes later, I was logged in to the plasma desktop, Hurray!! Hope you enjoyed my little story of drama and eventual success, now to see if I can get my data back on the main drive.
rotfl!

Well, good that you got there finally. But … openSUSE is an rpm based distro, we use zypper instead of apt-get. Re. the nvidia stuff, after adding the repo a


sudo zypper inr

would have installed the driver, and in your case not just that ( you also enabled Packman ), it would have done the whole multimedia stuff too :D.

It’s been a while and I couldn’t remember zypper and I knew that I could get away with apt-get so that was the route I took. I used to run Debian for a lot longer than OpenSUSE so that was where I fell back to my comfort level. As for multimedia, sound worked when I tested it, in fact my music has never sounded better and later on I will see if videos work. If not I will no doubt have success by tonight, and I usually don’t have too much trouble there, it’s just that video card thing that had me stumped for a while. I knew what I had to do, just not sure how to progress but I managed to fall into the right holes.

edit: wow I need a syntax checker.