Hi
I'm from the French patch north of Vermont. I have been interested in Linux for quite a while and since it's becoming more user friendly I decided to take a dip. First with kubuntu 7.04 where I'm starting to feel at home despite a few setbacks like the Install and Remove program
that stopped installing and a promising Nvidia video driver for Linux that I downloaded on my desktop and is waiting for me to learn what to do with a tar ball. This week I red that Suse 10.3 was also user friendly so I installed it on another drive but I was faced with the problem that I mentioned before, after an apparently successful install I was stock on a black page with at the bottom login prompts for user and password then a depressing third one that washed my smile off. I know my way around Windows quite well but Tempus Fugit and I doubt that I could master the command lines style before reaching my pine box. I will be the one benefiting from this forum because the only thing I could contribute is promote Linux to friends and family.

Hi and welcome to the Linux community, vagabundo!

I hope that you will enjoy Linux, not only as a operating system but the whole community around it. As I understand it you are just starting to learn your way around the different distros out there. Maybe you should take a look at www.distrowatch.com and read more about the most popular ones (their good sides, their bad sides, etc).

Have a nice day and good luck with your system.

...so this new problem is that you have installed SuSE and the install and remove program has promised an Nvidia driver and you are waiting to know what to do with a tarball (i.e., the second problem is the same as the first one, just with SuSE this time)? Or have I misunderstood?

..this other problem is that you only have a command line to log in and no gui, or is the problem that you are asked for a username and password and some unspecified third thing (and, presumably, you don't know how to log in because of this third thing, whatever that is)?

My guess is that your problem is that you haven't got a gui (and you want one). Probably you haven't got a gui because you didn't ask for one, although maybe you did have one once, and you did something with the nvidia driver that broke it.

SuSE gives you more options when you install than Ubuntu does, to give you finer control of what you get (and, err, perhaps more significantly here, don't get). Ensure that when you install, you tell SuSE that you want at least one GUI (KDE, Gnome, XFCE or others...it isn't a problem to ask for several if you want to try them out) and you probably want to specify something like the 'Office Software' bundle (can't remember the exact name, could be 'productivity software' bundle). If I were you, I'd stick to the plain vanilla graphics drivers, unless SuSE offers to sort that out for you automagically.

If you do get to the command line, there is a chance that 'startx' will launch a gui for you. But only if you have one installed and configured.

Sorry about the confusion I caused, I meant by "the problem I mentioned before" the problem with Suse 10.3 that I rudely submitted before an introduction.

Thanks for the assistance, I didn't even have to use the startx command my Suse-10.3 seems to have fixed itself, it probably thinks that I'm too thick in the brain, it doesn't even ask me to log in, I'm starting to think
that maybe the Kubuntu told him how it has cut off my access to the install button so I wouldn't screw the system.