LinuxQuestions.org - opensuse 12.2 kde4 gui scrambled?

Quote:

Originally Posted by n8thegr8gill (Post 4839220)

I'm super new to linux and upon the second boot I get a cut-up mish-mash of images (from previous session by the look of it) and a square for a mouse cursor and nothing is responding to mouse clicks. What gives? Should I have choosen Gnome? Is there a key command to switch over to gnome?

Well, in what may be seen as a less than helpful comment, that really shouldn't happen.

When you switched off after the first boot, you did do it via the menu (and gave it time to proceed) and not just hit the power button, didn't you?

Anyway, I don't see any good reason that Gnome would be better than KDE in this respect (you might prefer Gnome, but both (and others) should work without this corruption).

To try Gnome, you'd have to install it. If this was a CD install, you probably didn't have that option, but if it was the DVD, you have had the option, but you would have had to have to have selected it (ie, once you had selected one GUI, you would have had to had done something deliberate to select another one, but it would have been possible to select two or more).

Once you have several GUIs installed, you select which one is used at log-in time. There is an option, which isn't immediately obvious; I think that its a 'spanner' (wrench) shaped thing on the 'enter your password screen', and, if you select that, it should give you the chance to select from any of the GUIs that you have installed.

If I were to guess (...you should know the answer, but, at this point, I'm guessing...), my guess would be that you don't have Gnome (or other GUIs) installed, so you probably don't have the choice of simply switching to it. You'd have to install it. which would be simple, either at install time (with the right install media) or post-install (if you had a working install, and the 'net bandwidth). You could do this from the command line, but that might be a bit much, at this stage.

One possibility for the cause of the problem would be if you were to have a graphics card with a choice of third party drivers (accelerated drivers for AMD/Nvidia). For these, there are alternatives which have advantages and disadvantages (which include speed and fragility). If you could say which Graphics card you have, maybe something will become more apparent.

In any case, although there is probably a better, more sound, solution, it might be that a re-install is the best way forward (assuming that, being a new install, you don't already have much that you want to keep and assuming that the install isn't complex, with multi-boot and lots of partitions).

In summary, I see two likely possibilities

a corruption at shut off
selection of a 'tricky' graphics driver on the re-boot

I'm sure that there are others, but they are the ones that seem most likely, but more information would be welcome.