Man I have been kickn around and lurking on these forums for quite awhile so I am pleased to announce that I feel that my increased use of Suse warrants upgrading to a newer faster machine and the copy of XP that resided there gets demoted to the slower machine Suse used to live on

But holy heck what a nightmare it is to get everything running.I had forgotten as I had been upgrading my system instead of reinstalling it.

I have mostly have everything running but the nvidia drivers is sooo making me mad.

No matter what, I am getting the error indicating I am trying to compile from the wrong sources and yet yast shows that the kernel and its sources match just fine. uname -r shows same ? I can't find kernel-devel rpms if I need those by the way.I have googled for hours and I am giving up for today or maybe this week. I am really mad.
Anyways I thought I would include this bit I googled up somewhere thought it would work but still nothing. By the way /usr/src does have folders indicating older kernels that were patched by YOU.

The greatest problem with SuSE systems are with its setup utilities. They are hopelessly inflexible. When using an nVidia nForce motherboard and nVidia graphics card, one will want to use the official nVidia-supplied drivers where possible. SuSE provide repackaged versions of them both through the YaST Online Update tool. While RPM-based systems are supposed to determine the updates necessary for new packages to work, SuSE's system tended to "forget" important items. The recommended default installation option doesn't even include "make" or "autoconfig", which are necessary for anyone planning to compile their own software. Once SuSE's versions of the drivers have been downloaded, one would obviously wish to use them. For setting up the graphics card, the ageing SaX2 utility is provided. SaX2 fails to discover the new nVidia driver, or if it does, fails to set it up correctly. In addition, SaX2 fills the configuration file with much needless junk that prevents the more experienced user from setting up e.g TwinView without major surgery on the recommended configuration. Secondly there are two tools, YaST (shell based) and YaST2 for general system management. These are excellent for simple things, such as starting and stopping boot services, or if all that the user does is within the SuSE framework. Unfortunately if users wish to install software not provided by SuSE, including setting up their nVidia graphics card properly, they will regularly find themselves manually editing configuration files and doing their administrative work through the shell without YaST's graphical help.

A final comment and instructional: SuSE regularly provide kernel sources for a different version of kernel than that which is actually running on your system. If a user wished to install the nVidia-supplied drivers themselves, the installation would fail. There is, thankfully, an easy fix supplied by nVidia:

Found on Alliance of OC"ing Arts:

################## This section c/o NVIDIA ##################

cd /usr/src/linux

make cloneconfig

make prepare-all (only for kernel-source >= 2.6.5-7.75)

2) Use the nvidia installer for 1.0-6111.

a) kernel-source < 2.6.5-7.75

sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-6111-pkg2.run -q

b) kernel-source >= 2.6.5-7.75

sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-6111-pkg2.run -q --kernel-source-path=/usr/src/linux

########################################################

Hi dasbooter, I read your rant, and I think you have some valid points. Installing SuSE, as with any other distro, requires some effort. If something goes wrong, it requires that the user should have some basic knowledge of Linux. Also, sax2 needs more development, in fact, I think that it's buggy in SuSE 10.

However, I consider SuSE a very polished distro. It has its own peculiarities, once you learn them you have a quite powerful OS. Linux is about choices, you can try other distros and find the one you like more.

Anyway I hope you keep using SuSE, I have a lot of fun with it, I'm sure you'll also.

Actually I am a fairly experienced linux user although I still consider myself a noob bc of my reliance on various gui,s. Still none the less I have compiled various modules for my graphics card and old hardware eg. cameras etc got various secure ways of logging in remotely written simple scripts for automation run an apache server for a short time, you know stuff you can get working if you hack away at it

Anyways most problems are solved now.
A big problem was that my hardware was malfunctioning this was due to the fact that moving suse from a p3 667 to a celeron 4 system along with all the hard drives that were in the 667 system was too much for the Power Supply in the celeron system. Even though the celeron system had a newer more powerful power sup. various hard drives including ones in a software raid would drop out which = pain in the a**. Another problem was that the graphics card, an old geforce v7700 64mgb card, had a fan that all of a sudden stopped spinning intermittently. The card would overheat and X would freeze which = hold face in hands and sigh with exasperation because you dont know at the time whether it is a hardware or software problem. Anyways you finally stick your head in the case and notice that the fan isnt spinning = many nasty words yelled loudly which cannot be written here

Still, I think the compiling problems originated from a screw up by myself or Suse which some how occurs when security patching the kernel via You.I noticed this because after I replaced the card with an ati card (its amazing how much power you can get for so little nowadays) I still had problems compiling a module for it. I found a post which gave some information on making a symlink called build in /lib/modules/2.6.13-15.8-default to /usr/src/linux-2.6.13-15.8 not /usr/src/linux-2.6.13-15.8-obj/i386/default as it was originally. This seemed to fix things somewhat and the module built.
If somebody wants to fill me in on whats going on here I would appreciate it. Educational links welcome. What should I have in these two folders? Did I screw anything up by changing the symlink. Can I get YOU to fix the problems I might be having?

thanks all

dasbooter, using suse linux since suselinux 8.0

I had absolutely no trouble with any SuSE install I've done -- my most recent with an Nvidia card. Truth is that SuSE is an RPM based system. Directly compiled applications don't register in the data base of installed RPM's. For example if one installs Firefox 1.5 from a Mozilla tar, YaST will think 1.0.x is installed. In fact, both will be installed and without manual editing of kmenu only 1.0.x will be executed. SuSE doesn't however prevent users from having access to anything ibn the open source world, including gcc and make. SuSE has tested the RPMs they provide they don't have the same control for things we compile.

Thanks for your comments however my questions at the bottom of my post remain unanswered.

Why does Suse after security patching the kernel have the symlink for build point to /usr/src/linux-2.6.13-15.8-obj/i386/default instead of /usr/src/linux-2.6.13-15.8 does it perhaps have something to do with booting to the old kernel if necessary. Was this really the problem I encountered when compiling the nvidia module. I would really like to know to make this process less painful. By the way the fetchnvidia script has never worked for me.

If you examine the files and drill down through the directories you will find that linux-2.6.13-15.8 is where the source files are stored. My kernel has been upgraded before and everything works well so I assume this must be correct.

Your comment has little relevance, Fragos, but thanks for the input. I have been back and forth through all these directories and there sym links. The only way I was able to fix this issue caused when I patched the kernel with yast (a suse provided security update) was a post provided by asbisk00 and the information he provided. Googling brings up a plethora of people complaining of very similiar problems, perhpas they will find this post. Plain and simple, staying current with your security is very advisable. Suse without 3d accel for my application = lame (think XGL). The Nvidia driver is not open source ,oh well, lets deal with it. I am finished posting here.

Back to the Nvidia subject. I've found a strait forward way to upgrade the nvidia driver to the latest from the nvidia site. It works well in 10.0 and not so well in 10.1 RC3 but that release will be here 5/11. There's a program called "tiny-nvidia-installer" that part of 10.x. You'll need to su, init 3 and run it. It a very user friendly text based program. A security update to 10.0 turned off 3D and this was the only way I found to get it back. Its amazing what you can find just looking through the disk with the locate CLI program.