I installed SLED 10 the other day and it kept locking up randomly. Sometimes this would occur 10 seconds after I booted up, other times it would last up to 10 minutes before freezing. When the machine froze, the monitor would have all sorts of crazy colors on it and everything looked like gibberish. I could no longer see what anything on my desktop looked like and I'd have to manually power it off. I thought maybe this was a result of not having the most current nvidia driver installed, so I was able to download that from Nvidia's website and install it. This didn't seem to make a difference, so I decided to check my install media and then do a re-install. The computer froze up again immediately after the first boot and so I cycled the power and rebooted. Then when I logged in again, I was missing my start menu. I have rebooted multiple times now and the start menu is still not visible. Strangely enough, the OS seems to be stable now and I can launch firefox and other apps from the console and the machine continues to run without freezing. Has anyone experienced similar problems or could someone offer some advice on how to fix these issues? My hardware is as follows (I have had SUSE 9.3 running on this machine before):

ABIT NF8 Motherboard(w/integrated sound and lan)
AMD 64 3000
1GB RAM
Nvidia FX5500

Thank you in advance for your help.

It is just a guess, but when there are Video problems, other odd things can also happen. I have found it is best to do a video test during the install and if you have odd colors, a missing mouse or any other odd thing, then reduce the default colors to a lower value and/or reduce the screen resolution. Once you find a configuration that works and get your system up and running, load the nVidia video driver (1.0-8762 is the latest) and use it instead of the Update version you can find in Yast. Except for some Kernel updates that overwrite the driver, I have had the best luck using the nVidia driver for their video cards which you can get directly from nVidia.

In your present state, I keep thinking I would try and reload one more time, wipe the entire partition where you are loading SLED 10 and when you get to the point of seeing your video setup, test it and make sure it works before you let it go any further. Download the nVidia driver and burn it to a CD or put it on a different partition you can read from after the SLED 10 installtion.

To install the driver you must exit KDE or GNOME, using the terminal command "INIT 3" to exit X or if X is not running, still issue the INIT 3 command as the nVidia driver expects this to be your run level when it is started. You must use the root password to use the INIT 3 command. Further, when the command is done, you must log in again with the root password. Change to the folder where you have saved the nVidia driver and enter the command:

for 32 bit:

sh ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-8762-pkg1.run

for 64 bit:

sh ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-1.0-8762-pkg2.run

Just follow the prompts and reboot the computer when done.

Also, be VERY careful about adding in installation sources to SLED 10. Besides the update one you get during the install, you can add http://packman.unixheads.com/suse/10.1 and get your MP3 and video files updated (xine/amarok/mplayer) and seperately load the dvdcsslib file for DVD playback. But after that, I would remove packman and I would NOT update any files except from the default Novell update source. SLED 10 is very simular to SuSE 10.1 and will load its files, but very odd things will start to happen and the whole OS will go downhill very fast.

The idea about SLED 10 is to have a very stable version of Linux, your noted problems not withstanding, and it is not intended to have the very latest versions of programs loaded on it. You can get your multimedia working with Packman, but otherwise only load security updates posted by Novell and nothing else.

Thank You,

James D. McDaniel
Austin, Texas

I had the same problem in fedora core 5 before during switch from GUI to console or start another GUI session. Have you try using suse build in driver? See whether the same problem still occur?

Thanks for the replies. I have tried using the suse built-in nvidia driver, but that was not working either. Since I have already tried reinstalling, I may try to download the dvd iso instead of the 5 cds to see if this will make a difference. It should technically be the same thing, but I saw a post on another forum that a user had success doing this after he had problems with the cd iso's.

good luck, and please tell us how you success. Since you are using 64bit which is I'm not familiar.

Well, I downloaded the dvd iso and reinstalled sled 10. It doesn't seem to be experiencing the video issues that I had before, but after opening the control panel the main menu immediately crashed. I disabled a number of things including acpi, beagle, and gnome screensaver and the main menu is still continuing to crash intermittently. Does anyone else have any suggestions?

After multiple attempts at reinstalling SLED 10 and trying to narrow down my problems, I finally decided to flash my BIOS. After flashing the bios, I reinstalled SLED 10 and everything went smoothly. I have been up and running for a couple of days now with no crashes or other errors of any kind. Kind of frustrating that it took so long to figure out such a simple problem, but at least it's working now. Thanks again to everyone who offered their assistance.