This is a problem, that has been plaguing me for about a week. Sometime in November I did an update of my SLED 11 SP1 desktop (this is Novell Suse, not Open Suse). I use this workstation to run Abaqus, and it needs the Open GL X11 driver from NVidia to run. After the upgrade the system changed to using the Vesa driver, and I didn't notice it, till I tried to fire up Abaqus, and it complained, and wouldn't start. It was then that I noticed the resolution was degraded, and checked some items and realized that the system was not using the Nvidia driver.
So, I went into Yast, and used the tool to turn on the Nvidia driver. It recognized the card (Quadro 3400), and the monitor Dell 20" 1600 x 1200). I told it to test, and it locked up the machine (black screen, system unresponsive couldn't even switch to another terminal by using Cntl Alt F2)
I then restarted, and the same thing happened, the screen stays dark, and never gets to the login.
I then logged in under the safe mode, and used Yast to download and install the kernel, and the Nvidia drivers. then used the Yast monitor tool again. This time when testing it finally showed the screen in the right mode 1600 x 1200, and so I thought I was golden. But, on restart it continues to hang. (it never gets to the login page, and is unrepsonsive)

Has anybody else seen anything like this? I am pretty flummaxed, because I have found that Yast is usually pretty dependable. I can't tell if this is a kernel thing, or a new nvidia driver thing. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

I have seen a similar issue with an older Geforce 5200 GS card. First I went to nVidia and got the latest driver build from their website. I ended up having to do was boot the Failsafe kernel at boot. I then had to switch to a terminal(CNTL+ALT+F2) as root. I then used init3 to shut down the display manager. I then ran the nVidia Installer and then rebooted after it was finished. This resolved my issues not sure if this will help as I had to do this a little more than a year ago when working on a setup for a C3DC competition.

What's the output while it's booting when you press Esc?

As a first guess though, it might still be trying to load the built-in drivers. I had a similar issue which was fixed by adding 'nomodeset brokenmodules=nouveau' to the boot options in GRUB.

I had 11.4 on a Dell Optiplex GX620 (Pentium D 950 3.2GHx dual core). Prior to updating to 12.1 I replaced the NVidia NVS 280 card with a GeForce 9400GT 1Gb card. I already had 2 Dell 2007FP 20" monitors and the NVS card was not up to the job.

The first problem was that after installing the new card upgrading the NVidia driver from the Suse NVidia Build Service repository, I could no longer get the Twin View function to work. All I could get was a clone of the same screen on both monitors. After a lot of uninstalling and reinstalling drivers I downloaded the installer from the NVidia website and followed their instructions. This resulted in no GUI at all! I Googled the issue with my laptop and eventually gave up. I had alreeady backed up all my data, so I did a clean install of 12.1 and lo and behold everything came good. Much to my surprise the installation had used the nouveau driver and the controls in Yast worked. No sign of the nvidia-settings tool from before.

I tried this, but I'm not sure that I am doing it right. Here is the line in my Grub Menu.lst file:


title SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 SP1 - 2.6.32.46-0.3
root (hd0,6)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32.46-0.3-default root=/dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD5000AAKS-75YGA0_WD-WCAS84943999-part7 resume=/dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD5000AAKS-75YGA0_WD-WCAS84943999-part8 splash=silent showopts vga=0x31a nomodeset brokenmodules=nouveau
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.32.46-0.3-default

I put it at the end of the kernel line. is that right? This change as is did not help.

All right, after a lot of gnashing of teeth, I went back into YAST and used the software manager to go back to the previous version of the nvidia driver. Finally the system is coming up. I'm not sure what happened but there must be something about the newest version of the driver that was not copasetic for my system.

Specifically I uninstalled these drivers in YAST:
x11-video-nvidiaG02
nvidia-gfxG02-kmp-default

And installed:
x11-video-nvidiaG01
nvidia-gfxG01-kmp-default

I believe that what this did is change the nvidia driver from:

285.05.09_2.6.32.12_0.7.2

To:

173.14.30_2.6.32.12_0.7.12

While this is clearly an older build, it works, and at this point that is what I care about. Thanks to those of you that tried to help me.