I am running Suse 11 KDE4 on a Sony Vio VGN-S360 (ATI graphics).
No problems until today, when after the initial login black and white vertical lines appear on the screen, followed by the login music but no visuals, just a black screen. (I call it the black screen of doom)
I have tried booting into safe mode, running “sax2 -r” followed by “startx”. This gets me to the desktop but after rebooting I am back where I stated. I did notice that after going through the safe mode steps that all of my configurations (background image, icons, etc.) are set to the defaults as when Suse was first installed.
Surprisingly, I seemed to have fixed my own problem.
At the login screen I tried different session types, and noticed that the IceWM interface worked, which leads me to believe this was some problem with KDE4. Suse was booting fine (as mentioned ealier I could hear the login music) but was having a problem with the display.
Anyway, for the future users here is what I did (it is a strange fix, be warned).
After logging in, at the black screen I right-clicked then left-clicked the mouse numerous times until I got lucky and clicked on “Configure Desktop” from the right-click menu. At this point the “Configure Desktop - Plama Workspace” window appeared in the middle of my screen. I then left-clicked on the title bar and as I drug the window over the remaining black areas, my desktop appeared. Go figure.
I do have an opinion of what caused the problem. In the “Desktop - System Settings” there are options for “desktop effects”. I believe this black screen has something to do with the “Login visual effect” being enabled, then later disabled. I went back and enabled the login effect, and while I still get the black/white stripes after login, at least I get my desktop