I have suse10 installed on my Compaq Presario M2000 laptop, both 32 and 64 bit versions.
The 32 bit install won't shut down/reboot properly. It makes it until the message:
'The system is rebooting, please stand by..' but then it freezes with funny colorful patterns stuck to the screen and I manually have to hard-reset.
Any ideas?

It's hard to say. Check for logs for starters. Then examine /et/rc.d/rc.0 or the equivilant shutdown file that SuSe provides and see which program might be causing it to hang.

I'm running Slackware fine on my M2000.

Thanks for the reply,

Unfortunately I don't really understand much of what's going on in those files but halting the computer goes fine, only the reboot freezes. After the message:
'Sending all processes the KILL signal'
there are 3 blank lines, for two of them the status is 'done' but the middle one says 'missing'.
Is there a way to find out what exactly is going on during reboot/halt?

Also during bootup there is an error message that says:

<3>udev[2057]: run_program: open /dev/null failed
<3>udev[2057]: run_program: exec of program '/sbin/modprobe' failed

There is no accessible dev/null directory on the system and trying to manually create it the system says it already exists.
I guess that might have to do something with the reboot issue.

Unfortunately I can't really use Slackware since I don't have a distro specific driver for the conexant modem. Are you using your modem by any chance?
alma

I would be worried about those udev messages. I have similar reboot issues with my Compaq Armada 100s. It just didn't not work. If I recall correctly, I was once able to fix the problem by changing APM parameters in Kernel Configuration.

Anyway, those reboot lockups should not damge your system if Linux halted in a controlled manner before the lockup occurs.

I figured that it's not a big issue alone, i only have to shutdown and manually restart. I just tend to think that it might have to do something with other bugs I have.
Anyway, thanks for your help.