First of all, I am a total newbie with Linux. I know computers very well, just Windows based PCs though. I have a Dell XPS M1730 with NVIDIA GeForce 8700M GT. It has two hard drives that came with a RAID 0 configuration. But I disabled that feature so now they are just two separate hard drives. Here is my problem. When I try to install OpenSUSE 11 everything goes very well, until it restarts to the login screen. Then no matter what user name I put into it, it won’t work. At first I thought maybe I forgot my username and password. But I have tried to install OpenSUSE 11 about 6 times now and I keep getting the same problem. The only login it will allow me to do is the root login. But other than that, nothing. Can someone please help me?! I am seriously about to go insane over this. I really appreciate it. Thank you very much to you all. 
Seeing you state you are a newbie… You know Linux is case sensitive? That also goes for user login and password.
If you have created the user with a capital letter (e.g. Nathan) then you must also use this to login with.
Hope that sorts it
Cheers,
Wj
When you say you login as root, do you mean with a GUI or just Command Line?
Do you see a proper GUI login at all?
We really need more detail on what you see, what you have tried at login.
I can get to the GUI screen that welcomes you. It is there that I can ONLY login as a root user and not as my user id and password. And I already know everything is case sensitive. It just keeps not letting me on no matter what I do. Thank you all again.
is it possible that you changed your keyboard configuration after installing SL?
You could try to see if you can log in with the user account on a tty console.
At the login screen press <ALT><Ctrl>+<F1> , that should bring you to the primary console.
Are you able to login in there? You can also test if the keyboard input is as you expect it (on the user name field).
To switch back to the GUI hit <ALT><Ctrl>+<F7>
-Wj
p.s. check /etc/passwd to see if the user accounts are specified in there. Other than you would expect, but you won’t see any passwords listed there.
Hi
If you login as root (since that’s all that appears to work), then use
YaST -> Security and Users -> User and Group Management to verify your
user has been created including home directory and reset the password.
You can also do this via the command line;
Press ctrl+alt+F1 and login as root
yast
exit
ctrl+alt+F7
The ctrl+alt+F7 gets you back to the GUI (X session).
--
Cheers Malcolm °¿° (Linux Counter #276890)
openSUSE 11.0 x86 Kernel 2.6.25.18-0.1-default
up 1 day 21:56, 2 users, load average: 0.03, 0.03, 0.04
GPU GeForce 6600 TE/6200 TE - Driver Version: 177.80I will try this and see if it works. Thank you all very much. And ANYMORE suggestions would GREATLY be appreciated. Thank you again.
You can access yast to change the password with a console log in.
At the welcome screen choose console log in in the menu at the bottom left of the screen.
Log on as root then type yast. You’ll need to use the keyboard to navigate as the mouse is not available here
Then go to security and users then user and group management. mark you user and click edit. Choose a new password with just numbers for now this will make sure you don’t have the wrong keyboard layout.
Once you done that accept the changes and exit yast.
At the prompt again type exit and log on as your normal user then type startx.
Now you can check your keyboard layout in yast and change your user password to something better.
Geoff