I've been having problems with some other stuff on Linux and I ended up reinstalling it, and this time when I installed the graphics driver Sax2 says that 3d is enabled........whatever. Its working great though

Do you know that if you reinstall, you don't have to lose all your personal settings? Almost all of them are in your /home directory, so don't format that partition, and you'll still have it all intact. In Slackware, for instance, you'll have to assign it a mount point and add it to /etc/fstab but you do not need to format it.

I don't advocate "reinstalling" in *nix, because it's possible to access anything and fix the problem. However, I have done it several times, because I couldn't find out from reading, Googling, and posting at LQ how to fix something. After a few days it was more expedient.

Hope this helps if you go that route again.

I don't get exactly how to do that.....I tried when I reinstalled this time........That would be in the / partition? I don't get how you keep that and reinstall everything else in the / partition.......

You cannot if you install everything to the / partition. However, if you setup a separate /home partition, then it's easy. I guess you could copy the /home directory from your / partition to a shared partition in your Windoze system, if you have one, and then copy it back after you reinstall. However, it's much easier to setup a /home partition in your Linux distro in the beginning.

I've never used SuSE, so I don't know how you install, or how you partition your hard drive. In Slackware we choose between fdisk and cfdisk. I use fdisk, and here's how I setup my partitions. I have 2 identical Maxtor 60GB hard drives.

I setup all the Linux partitions using fdisk while installing Slack. The Windoze partitions were setup using Disk Manager (Seagate utility) before installing Win2000. I use FAT32 on the Win2000 OS so that I can ghost the drive; and I use FAT32 on the other Windoze partitions so that I can read and write to them in Slack. In Slack I use ReiserFS on all the partitions, except, of course, the swap partition.

When I chose to reinstall, I did not format the /dev/hda9 partition that holds my /home directory, but just mounted it and added it to /etc/fstab. I found that was very easy to do with the Slack setup.

If you ever decide to change distros, I'd suggest Slack. Before starting, print the Slackware-HOWTO file from CD1, and it will give you all the information you need to setup Slack very easily IMO.

OK, the way I have my Linux install setup is I have a swap partition and a partition with everything else on it, so I can't do that the way I have it setup now, except to copy the files somewhere else, then replace the blank home with the old files. Thanx for the help

You should setup different partitions when you first install your system. The commercial distributions (like SuSE) may not make that option very clear to you.

whats the advantage to that besides being able to reinstall a little easier?

If something happens and I hose my system, which I have done, I can just reinstall and not lose my personal settings in programs such as Mozilla. My bookmarks are in the /home partition. My mail from KMail is in my /home partition, as well as the personal settings for it. Just about all the personal settings for everything from your desktop, to software run under Wine (software designed for Micro$loth only), are contained in your /home partition. If you keep everything under / and you reinstall, then you'll have to start all over. That can really be disappointing, especially after you've used your system for a while. If you didn't document everything you did, you'll probably not be able to restore your personal settings. And even if you do, it'll take a lot of time.

Also, if you receive some spam that would fill your inbox, when you keep everything under / it can grind your system to a halt. If you have a separate partition for /var, then it will just go into /var/spool/mail and when that partiton is full, the damage stops. You won't lose the functionality of your entire system. You should also have a separate /tmp partition.

These are some of the things you'll want to read about. Read how the linux kernel operates, and what goes in those separate directories. Decide what you want to use your comp for, and then you can set it up more for your specific needs.

These are some quotes from the site of Markus Welsch, a knowledgeable LQ member.
I hope this helps "get you down the road." I'm learning that *nix is more versatile than I could ever have imagined. It's fulfilling all my computing needs. The documentation is quite esoteric, and it seems that if you ask 10 people "How-To" about the same subject, you can get 15 answers, and they all say "that worked for me," but then none of them will work for you.

So, you have to read and learn how some stuff works, and take some things with a grain of salt. And remember, here at LQ anyone is free to post their opinion, and sometimes they'll just post a guess. So, we are responsible for what we execute on our own system. After a while you'll notice who posts and really knows what they're talking about.

OK, thanx a lot for the info. Next time I reinstall (which will be very soon, I'm switching out comps within the next month) I will look into doing that with SuSE.

In the meantime, search and find out how to copy your present /home directory to one of your writable Windoze partitions, so when you reinstall you can just copy it back and keep all those little settings you've been working on so diligently