last night after loading suse 9.2 from the CD's system booted to KDE fine, and I was able to load ndiswrappers and get wireless connectivity.

however on subsequent reboots, the system now comes up to a non-graphical login prompt.

the interesting thing is that the system shutdown apparently good to go, but boots back up to the login prompt.


Background
I suspect a problem with the graphics card, and moved the card to a different PCI slot as a longshot. that may have done nothing but the symptom of failure was that on a reboot, the monitor power button remained amber instead of green, indicating a lack of video signal.
so far on a new slot, the monitor comes up.
first time it came up, I got the YAST video config screen (not sure where it fires in rc3?rc5?) took the graphical interface and it seems to have taken.

still the system doesn't boot into kde
a startx on the command line errors out with a signal 11.

Suggestions on where to start troubleshooting?
thanks

Dose SUSE use the normal 'init' process with an /etc/initab file?

Maybe the upgrade changed your default runlevel? Look in your /etc/initab file... what's the default run-level at boot -- that would be the line which starts with a capital 'S', followed by one character.

-c

Try running the command sax2 as root. This tool may help you by automatically reconfiguring your graphics card.

Thanks guys.
I think the problem was related to X windows starting up due to failure of the graphics card. sax2 does seem to configure the card correctly. There has always been something flaky about the boot process on this system and now I think it's a problem with that card. I've never messed around with the X config and debugging a system w a hardware problem seemed to be a bad way to start.

I pulled the graphcs card, and now running off the onboard intel chipset, rebooted but with the same result, except the screen was virtually unreadable.

I decided to smoke the system and reload linux

From there, running off the integrated video, came up in an 640x480 graphics mode. Was able to reset the 15" display with sax2 1024x768 so now it looks good. I reset virtual dimensions first, then physical - that worked.

cconstantine- I'll have a look at the initab since I never figured out where the decision to bring up the console in text mode vs kde/X windows occurs. seems that could occur again if I mess up the video.

Assuming that if I mess up the video with sax2, I can restore a backup copy of the sax2 config files and reboot.

What files need to be backed up to preserve the video config if I mess it up trying to reset the video parameters with sax2?

thanks

The file is /etc/X11/xorg.conf.