Hi Marjorie

Yes - my xorg.conf and glx-info return looks exactly like yours.
Its just that I only got there by downloading the Nvidia driver. Then exit the X server and did init3. Then, as root, I ran it, and ran into trouble. Start all over, and ensure I had the kernel-sources installed (via Synaptic). As the final act, I manually edited /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and changed "nv" to "nvidia". Reboot, and I was greeted with the Nvidia screen flash. Then I started playing with the nvidia-xconfig and others that had appeared as command line options. As I recall, I did not have to do all this with the SUSE 9.3 boxed set.

Maybe I go where I should not, given my proven ability to mess things up, but now I am distracted by Xen virtual machine that comes with SUSE 10.2. It works - it works, and its my new toy that soothes over my gripes about Nvidia drivers. I still have lots of questions about it, probably more appropriate in a Xen thread, but I can affirm that the SUSE 10.2 (alpha) presentation of Xen, with all the easy setup screens could probably allow folk to run more than one distro without even fully understanding how it is all done. It is important that the system being run is Xen-aware, and co-operative. I have yet lots to figure out on that point.

I guess I'm still testing what SUSE offers this time. How it presents Xen is an impressive diversion. I will not give up Mepis 6.0, but after that period of all those silly snags, I think the professional strength of SUSE is starting to show through again.

Hi GTrax

I have a multi-boot computer - Windows XP plus an assortment of distros - on which I recently installed a GeForce FX5200 to replace the original onboard ATI, because the latter did not offer 3D in Linux (although OK in Windows of course). As you can imagine, I then had to go through each distro (seven of them) re-configuring the graphics after installing the new card. I had to contend with messing around with xorg.conf for some of them but for most it was a generally smooth procedure.

However, the one distro I had a lot of trouble with was SUSE 10.0. I originally tried the easy way, ie downloading the nvidia driver via YaST's YOU (Online Update) but ran into various problems. So I then did it the "hard way", ie downloading the driver from the Nvidia site, exiting the X server and doing # sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-8776-pkg1.run and that worked fine.

SUSE 10.1 was very easy. I just added download.nvidia.com as an installation source in YaST and then (in Software Management) selected x11-video-nvidia and nvidia-gfx-kmp-"kernel-flavor" for installation, rebooted and that was it. All done and working !!

I haven't downloaded SUSE 10.2 yet. Haven't quite decided whether to or not at the moment. 10.1 has been a bit of a struggle at times, what with the Zen updater problems and all that !!

Hi Marjorie

If you have invested a lot in 10.1, and managed to fix it with updates maybe, then you might want to keep it awhile. I was hopelessly jammed with it, and and I gave up, ending up with Mepis 6.0.

I got the 10.2 when it was still Alpha, but at a late stage. There was a quite large list of the bugs considered to be very serious. All but the last were crossed through with a red line (indicating fixed!), and the last was ignorable for me.

I know 10.2 is at beta now, and very probably 10.1 has had a lot of fixes applied, but for me, it was a catch-22 situation in that it was the updating and YAST package management that was broken. The line of least resistance was to start again. Losing all that broken stuff in one go made the move 10.2 so absolutely well worth the big torrent download.

G

FWIW - I do not use the nVidia drivers available under YaST, and instead d/l the drivers directly from nVidia and manually install them as Marrea indicated above. At least for me, when it comes to nVidia the manual approach always works, the YaST approach doesn't. That's just my own experience, but I would definitely recommend a manual install.

In any case, thanks everyone for posting back with the updates. No doubt your comments will be helpful to future readers who may have the same question

Hi GTrax

If anything, I think I am more likely to stick with 10.0.

My experience with 10.1 has been mixed. I got the original Zen problem sorted out by following the instructions on the SuSE Linux Forum and it all worked fairly well up until a few weeks ago when I did a libzypp update. That resulted in 10.1 misbehaving itself again and I couldn't seem to do anything with YaST's Installation Source or Software Management or Online Update. They all just kept hanging and producing error messages. Eventually I managed to coax it back into life by deleting all the installation sources and then re-inserting them (and that wasn't entirely trouble free as it refused to re-insert some of them at first). Everything is OK at the moment but I'm beginning to lose confidence in it, as I never know when it is going to throw another wobbly.

I don't know about you but I like to use my operating systems, rather than constantly be trying to get them to work.

On the other hand, 10.0 keeps plodding along faithfully without so much as a murmur (except for the nvidia issue but that was fixed as soon as I did a manual download and install of the driver instead of using YOU - I think J.W. is quite right with his recommendation of doing it this way.). So I am inclined to keep that going for a while yet - unless the final release of 10.2 gets rave reviews.

Yes, I too quite like Mepis although in terms of a second choice to SUSE I don't use it as much as I do Ubuntu.

what about speed?
I recently installed latest suse HEAD sources (2.6.18.2) and compiled custom kernel. Next compared bootchart results to the previous suse kernel (same .config) 2.6.18 and it looks like suse is getting slower. I can only imagine that default pre-compiled kernel is even worse (in terms of speed).

Still exploring SUSE 10.2 (late alpha)

YAST/YUM are slow, and wierd things sometimes happen if two repositories have the same package, or if you have too many install sources enabled at the same time maybe. I was hoping a combination of YAST and apt would suit for most purposes.
The install-apt4suse command (script) does not seem to work

I completely admire the script in /usr/bin by Sébastien Corot, but trying to modify it is not yet comfortable territory for me.

Maybe I had better install the beta first

Been playing around with beta 2 for a couple of days and I'm getting more settled in.
Many, many problems at first, which I will put down to it being beta but finding it much easier to get things set up than I did with 10.1 GM or the remaster. And with the beta I'm going with 64-bit so there's a bit more to do.
There are some things still not working perfectly in 10.1 but in beta2 I have multimedia support, flash, realplayer, acrobat, java and mplayer browser plugins all set up and working. Beryl set up and working even smoother than 10.1.
A few more things to set up and I should be ready to drop 10.1.