Troubles with SuSe 9.1
 

Awhile ago, a friend of mine d/led and gave me a version of SuSe 9.1 Linux to which I installed on my comp. It boots and works fine, except:

I cannot connect to the net via dial-up
It starts up in a text-based prompt and not a more graphical based start-up

Like when I start, it goes throgh the whole loading proccess, then when I get done with that it ask for login and password, then its pretty much something like

someone@linux>

or something similar to that. I have no clue, since it is a d/led version and I have no documentation. On install I set it to the default, which I think was Multiuser on network, which I'm not sure is the problem or not.

As for the connection, I gave it all the info I knew to, and it still wouldn't connect for some reason. I have a Lucent Winmodem, but from what I know it should have detected it. It gets as far as trying to connect, but thats as far as it goes. I don't hear the dial tone, either.

summing thing up:

HELP

thanks

A winmodem in linux your gonna have to hunt down drivers for it if its lucky enough to be supported. Try www.linmodems.org. I've never had SUse but i guess they have a graphical tool you can use to change to a graphical boot or you can just edit the /etc/inittab to change the default runlevel from 3 to 5 or whatever Suse's graphical runlevel is. You have to be root to edit /etc/inittab

Id think that your first step might be to learn the command which should start the grapic interface (is KDE still SuSE default?).

I can't recall how you'd tell it to start kde as the initital windowing environment - I suspect it's different with the gentoo that I use.

The winmodem problem, well the device may be detected, and you may have well put the correct info into the dialler facility, but I understand that winmodems usually need a very specific driver - which I can only suggest that you boot back into windows and google for winmodems (http://www.google.com/linux for linux specific answers) to find out more about that.

Plus have a dig around at the LQ distributions forums, there is a SuSE/Novell specific sub forum that may have something.

Sorry if that isn't very helpful, but I only ever used SuSE for a very short time 3 years ago - but it may give you some direction to the right place(s) too look.

regards

John

I'll try that

As for the iniitab file, I've tried to alter it, but cann't for some reason. But anyways, I think I might can get something done through bigjohns help

Ah, yes. /etc/inittab rings bells.

Mine looks like this
How much of that is specific to gentoo, I don't know, but if I remember correctly the salient bit is the bit, it's telling the system that you want the default setup to be init 5 which is graphic interface, init 3 is what you have to use for just command line input (I recall that from installing/upgrading the nvidia driver).

<stunned>Bugger me! a proper suggestion rather than a general "this is where I found stuff about ......." type answers</stunned>

Erm, the only downside, is that you might have not been able to alter than unless you start a text editor after you logged in as root!

Which might not be the easiest of things to get your head round unless you have done text edits before (with one of the editors). My install (gentoo) uses one called "nano" by default, others might use "VI" or "VIM", or maybe "emacs". These may look like vvvvv basic word processors (which you can do with them), but they're not (unfortunately).

I'm guessing that your SuSE, might have installed VI as default, so you'd have to surf for some basics about using it, print them off, then boot into the SuSE install, and then log in as root (plus root password), the at the # prompt just type vi /etc/inittab and you should be able to make the change to get the system booting into kde (presumably) as default.

If your system has an nvidia based graphics card, you might also want to then check out the nvidia site for the driver (which is normally only available pre installed with "paid for" versions - well it is with mandrake, don't know about SuSE).

Erm, once you're happy with basic edit stuff in vi/emacs/whatever, it's less hassle, cos you don't have to keep swapping between user accounts and root, which graphically can be a pain/time consuming. You just open a terminal/konsole window, and at the $ prompt, type su and hit enter, you'd then be asked for the root p'word, and then it's just vi /usr/share/whatever or whichever file you need to edit.

Sorry if thats a bit of a shitty explaination, but I don't know how much IT knowledge/experience you have. It's about the best I can do without looking over your shoulder!

regards

John