Hi. I am new to OpenSuse and these forums. I used Mepis from early 2005 until video problems forced a switch to Mint. I have used Mint for several months and find it usable and stable, but I am still looking. I am a user, not a geek. Therefore I have a couple of nooby questions. I downloaded openSUSE-11.3-KDE4-LiveCD-i686, verified the md5sum and burned on a DVD-RW. I realize that this is a CD ISO, but I didn’t think that would matter.
The LiveCD booted to a black screen. I tried nomodeset and got to a text login.
Questions:
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What is user name and password for live CD?
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I read NEW Users - openSUSE Pre-install (general) – PLEASE READ and noted “6. Check MD5SUM again from within installation CD/DVD”. So I did. The md5sum does not match with the downloaded ISO, which was correct. Should it? Does the fact I burned on a DVD make a difference?
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Finally this thread 11.3 will not load after the first reboot during install seemed to discuss a similar black screen problem, but it concludes it is a kernel bug. I am trying to install on a Dell E6510 Latitude with the nvidia chip (pertinent lspci result: 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NVS 3100M (rev a2)). The interesting thing is that it works with several different kernels in Mint [2.6.35-23-generic; 2.6.35-21-generic; 2.6.37-0.dmz.6-liquorix-686]. Thoughts? Could this be just a bad DVD burn?
Thanks in advance.
To question 1 I found this answer from oldcpu.
The openSUSE Linux live CD has the user “linux” and password is < enter >
It also has the user “root” and the password is < enter>
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When you burn a CD or DVD. the m5d checksum should match that given online, so your downloaded file is good. Before you install a CD or DVD, you can optionally check the media which will confirm if the actual media within matches it checksum and is in general readable. If the first does not match, download the file again, if the second does not pass, burn another copy of the disk.
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With a Bad CD or DVD, it is hard to say what you will get, but the nomodeset should be tried first once you know you have a good download and the media passed the media check and you seem to have a video problem.
Thank You,
okie2003, welcome to openSUSE and the forum. That old 11.3 thread you quoted involved different graphics hardware to yours.
As you are “a user, not a geek”, avoid introducing potential complications and therefore match the downloaded iso image to the media for which it was intended i.e a CD (-R or RW should work), or download the DVD iso. 
James, thanks for the reply. I did reburn – this time to a CD and on a slow rate. The check sum is the same as before. I assume it is good. Anyway I tried several boot options with no success. Boots to black screen. Can hear music and after a pause I can type in linux and hit return twice and the cd spins like the install is finishing. I assume that the only problem is video. When I boot to text and try startx it errors out with no nvidia module loaded and no screens found. This is similar to why I left Mepis. That was an older Dell with an older nvidia chip. I guess I will wait and try the newer one in about 3 weeks.
James, thanks for the reply. I did reburn – this time to a CD and on a slow rate. The check sum is the same as before. I assume it is good. Anyway I tried several boot options with no success. Boots to black screen. Can hear music and after a pause I can type in linux and hit return twice and the cd spins like the install is finishing. I assume that the only problem is video. When I boot to text and try startx it errors out with no nvidia module loaded and no screens found. This is similar to why I left Mepis. That was an older Dell with an older nvidia chip. I guess I will wait and try the newer one in about 3 weeks.
Yes, it sounds like you did load openSUSE successfully, but no video when it starts up, but did you add the nomodeset kernel option? You can type it right in before pressing the enter key for the standard openSUSE 11.3 startup entry in your grub menu.lst file. Also, you can try the failsafe command which among other things, includes the nomodeset kernel load option. You just got to try and add that kernel load option and see if it helps. When openSUSE is running, you can try Ctrl-Alt-F1 and go to a terminal session. You can type in this to kill X:
Ctrl-Alt-F1
root
password:
init 3
root
password:
mc
The mc loads the midnight commander in the terminal mode and can be used to navigate to the /boot/grub/menu.lst file where you can make perminate the kernel load option nomodeset. Look at the failsafe entry and see the nomodeset command is there.
Thank You,
Yes, I did type in nomodeset and failsafe and vesa with and without nomodeset. Fail safe gave an error saying I needed to turn or PnP in my BIOS. I looked through every option in it and didn’t find a way to do this. On my older machines I remember seeing this, but not on this new Dell. Is there a way I can, by either booting into text mode or droping into text mode as you describe above, load the latest nvidia driver? In an earlier version of Mepis we used smxi from here smxi sgfxi svmi :: How to Install the Scripts to load it. I doubt that would work in Suse since it is for Debian systems (I think). anyway, I thought there might be something similar in Suse.
You must download the latest nVidia driver for your video card and copy it to your computer. I place such files in the user area download folder (~/Downloads). Normally, when you select any kernel version to load (from the grub menu.lst selection menu), you can just enter the number 3 as an option and press enter. This will prevent the X Server from loading and keep you in the terminal mode. You log in as root with the root user password. At which time you could then switch to the folder where the nVidia driver is located and run it as:
sh ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-260.19.36.run
You must have installed the kernel source file and I normally add in the development packages for base, kernel and C++ development using yast patterns to select the required files. It is possible to run yast in the terminal mode as well where you could install the required packages. But I must say it will be a pain getting ready to install the driver, though you do always install the nVidia driver at the terminal prompt in run level 3.
Thank You,
James,
Thanks for the information. What I am thinking is that I might just choose install when the cd starts instead of trying to boot live. I have a test partition for this purpose. Then I could boot into my work install and download the driver and place in the appropriate spot in the Suse partition and then boot back into Susie text mode and follow your instructions. but that will be next week before I can try it. We will see.
Thanks again.