Greetings from Guelph, Ontario. I wanted to post this in case it could help someone else who has the Radeon HD6290 video card in their system.
My laptop is an Asus X53U with 2 AMD Brazos processors, 4 gigs of ram and the aforementioned Radeon card, and a fresh install of openSUSE 12.2 64 bit Gnome with the default open source Radeon driver.
Last week, an update killed the video after the Grub2 splash screen {leaving only black screens) and I was only able to use the system by choosing the advanced options for openSUSE in the Grub2 screen and selecting the first openSUSE kernel listing there.
However, after applying more recent updates today, the problem has corrected itself. So, if you have the same problem, try using the advanced options in Grub2, applying all updates and hopefully you will be back on track.
I hope this helps someone.