I recently installed suse 9.2 on my desktop. Everything works great. I installed the Nvidia drivers via YOU (Yast Online Update) and thought everything worked well. I was quite wrong. When I reboot my computer, and select the normal Suse boot at the boot loader, it gets to where you can see "starting kdm" on the screen and then my monitor turns off. If I try a failsafe (which is what I am using right now) it works just fine, the Nvidia logo appears before I get into KDM and it is perfect. I recently tried booting suse with the parameters: "apm=off acpi=off" and it worked okay. Now whenever I boot it with that, it does the same thing, the monitor turns off. I also tried "vga=normal" but to no avail. Is there any way I can fix this? Thanks.

Have you tried booting into runlevel 3 (non-graphical) by typing 3 in the boot options when you first start up? I'd also recommend installing the Nvidia driver manually; I've never had YOU set it up correctly.

I had a similar problem but it turned out to be the output from the nvidia card switching from DVI to analogue.
Due to a missing line or two in my XF86Config I have to ensure the monitor is switched to analogue (HD15) when init 5 is used as opposed to being able to use DVI in init 3. Still not sorted, I just use the analogue connection.

Depending on your monitor/connections you may find a similar problem/cure.

yes ive tried running runlevel 3, no such luck. i log in, type kdm and it dies

Thats what I meant - the output from the card to the monitor on mine changed when changing from init 3 to init 5, so screen "dies".

What connections do you use from card to monitor? Have you got several inputs on the monitor that you could test?

no i only have analog and DVI, im using dvi as of now.

I think you may find that if you can use the analogue connection your picture appears.

I was fortunate to have both types connected at once so a quick press of a button on the monitor revealed all! Peculiar enough I was looking for sound at the time and wondered why I was getting sound in init 3 and not init 5, and then discovered the change over in video modes.

As mentioned earlier, I believe there is a fix for this with a couple of lines in the /etc/X11/XF86Config (linked to xorg.conf) file but not sure which and analogue does me at the moment.

Quick bit of research reveals what might be the problem.
If your monitor is a LCD/TFT as mine is, the power management (DPMS) doesn't work properly so the monitor may goto sleep.

See NVidia readme , appendix N.

Still no further with curing this though.

EDIT: Not 100% on this - had read thro' nvidia forum and still not sure. May be anyone of a number of things

Have you tried issuing "startx" after you've logged into the system when in level 3? (Don't think you need/want to run kdm once you're logged in but, then, I've never tried that.)

Are you seeing anything interesting in your X log file? (/var/log/Xorg.0.log)