What is the difference between the boot files that end in “-default” and “-desktop” ? It appears that my system couldn’t fully boot into the normal mode using the ones that end in “-desktop”, (the screen would get stuck with the background logo), but can using the ones that end “-default”, and I note the filesizes (i.e. vmlinuz-3.11.6-4-default vs. vmlinuz-3.11.6-4-desktop) are different.
They are kernels compiled with different compile time options. I’m not sure of all of the differences.
For 32bit version, the default kernel can only see something less than 4G of memory, while the desktop kernel can see all memory using PAE extensions. That’s the most important difference. If you memory falls below 4G, then it isn’t much of a concern.
Other differences are, I think, tweaks that I probably wouldn’t notice but a gamer might notice.
I see what you mean; I have 8 GiB of memory and the system was only recognizing 3. So I changed the menu.lst files to use the *-3.11.6-4-desktop files, but still yet, it does not fully load up … the screen still goes blank (I failed to mention that was what was happening before), and the Monitor goes into Screen Saver mode, and I can’t get the monitor to come back on to see if there are any errors messages or not, and I have no way of knowing what to post or subject title to provide – the failsafe selection works, but it only recognizes 1 CPU (instead of 2), and the letters and graphics are really big (something that wasn’t initially happening) – I don’t know whether to try to re-install openSUSE 13.1 KDE again, or restore a backup for openSUSE 12.3 KDE … maybe the zypper dup will work, but sometimes, I find what I THINK will be shortcuts will turn out to be longcuts.