I've got a nice new netbook running Suse Enterprise desktop.

I'm used to a more nuts and bolts version to be honest (used Red Hat 6 for years), and am struggling to get to grips with such a buttoned down managed version.

It seems to have a CD rom fetish- thinking its windows. And no C compiler?!?

Anyway that's not my issue.

In banging my head against the installation managers I've managed to make it drop me out to a command prompt on start-up, meaning I have to startx to get the desktop, and there is no power management running
(shutdown just does nothing in desktop).

Any ideas what I've broken and how to put it back?

Does the X system works properly after you issue startx? If so, the first thing to check is what runlevel is set as default for the init process:

Run Level 3, I think.


PS I seem to be getting to grips with running YaST from the web.

If the line in /etc/inittab is
just change to
and the system will automatically start the X server at boot.

That's great, did the trick.

Thanks very much.