On Monday 21 January 2008 18:01:47 Maura E Monville wrote:

On Jan 20, 2008 9:27 PM, Jonathan Ervine <jervine@novell.com> wrote:

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On Monday 21 January 2008 01:11:37 Maura Edelweiss Monville wrote:

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About 2 months ago I replaced SuSE 9.3 with 10.3. Last Friday I turned on my laptop. To my dismay the screen was messed up... sort of divided into three

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Therefore X was messed up ... how come ? It worked fine up to the night before. I turned off the computer in the end of my working session. In short I had to reinstall SuSE 10.3 which fixed the problem. But the serious difficulty was to save three directories where I have all my recent developments. I

Xorg seemed to get an update over the weekend. It should have been a simple case of re-running sax2 to get your video working again.

Can sax2 be started from a text window ? I have never used it. I guess you mean that through sax2 I could have reinstalled X server ... ?

Yes - sax2 can be launched from a command line without an X server running. It wouldn't have reinstalled your X server, but would have reconfigured your xorg.conf to a working configuration.

Worst

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case scenario is you could have dropped back to using the generic vesa driver, or the open source ATI or nVidia drivers.

I am not that knowledgeable about the O.S. I develop and use scientific s/w packages. I expected the guy who came to fix the problem to know these workarounds since he states he has been admistrating Linux systems for 5 years ... That's why I need another system to be more autonomous.

To be honest an update to Xorg shouldn't have broken your X configuration. Do you know if you're using the proprietary ATI or nVidia drivers?

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from the simple text- mode I could compress and ftp my directories to my web site from which I could recover them after reinstalling SuSE 10.3

Sounds like you have one big single partition. Most people on here will partition /home separately so that all personal settings and data can be retained if a full reinstall is required.

I simply accepted the installation defaults. I know that SuSE has an incoporated partioning tool.I never ran it.

You should definitely look into creating a separate /home partition as it makes upgrades/reinstalls so much less painful.

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As a consequence I fell behind my schedule. To prevent future emergencies I am thinking of getting another laptop/notebook. Since I have to use MS Office every now and then I would consider to run alternatively Windows and SuSE through WMware. Now I run MS Office through CrossOveR. Is WMware stable and reliable ?

A second system is always very useful to have around. VMware is very stable and reliable in my experience.

Which WMware ? There is a free package and a commercial one.

Go to the VMware website and look for the VMware Server product. It's free, although you do have to register in order to get an activation key. Good luck, Jon -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org