> Ideas needed on what might have become of my Open Suse computer. All worked > fine until I returned from holiday, turned on computer (saving power and the > planet and all) and when it loads I end up with garbage on screen.
> I doubt it's a hardware problem as the splash screen looks perfect when > loading. Press escape and it all looks good scrolling all the lines of > commands or whatever it is doing, you know, loading this and loading that. > Gets to the point of loading the actual desktop (KDE) and screen becomes > unreadable. All I see is an ugly mixture of blurred colours and the odd > square shape. ????? I wouldn't discount the possibility of a hardware problem, but I'd check out a few more software issues first. To check for hardware problems, boot a SUSE live CD/DVD, or any other live disk which runs with full graphics. The symptoms you describe sound a bit like one of those many daft screen savers which kick on randomly... The problem appears to be happening when the system enters runlevel 5, i.e. starts the X (graphics) server. The splash screen and boot msg scrolling happen in some frame buffer video thing. If things go boom when starting the X server, boot into runlevel 3 by adding a single digit 3 on the grub boot command line. This will give a full system with console logins and everything else but graphics. Login as root and look around for anything odd. If you need to run filesystem checks, do that by booting with grub option "single" (typed out, no quotes), or boot into a rescue system by selecting same option when booting from one of your bootable install media. How long since you rebooted before you turned off the box before going on holiday? Because if it's a software issue, you monkeyed with something, or a patch which you installed went pearshaped-after-reboot. Many problems only show up after a reboot becaus while the system is running, it keeps using the old binary which is already running. Check out the time stamps of files in /etc/X11/, esp xorg* files. From runlevel 3, run sax2 as root, this configures your graphics and should be the easiest way to see if your hardware still starts ok in graphics, though it's also possible that you have a disk corruption (or file system corruption, possibly caused by partial disk failure). <dig>Unlike Debian & Co, </dig> rpm allows you to run a complete package check with rpm -Va. You need to be able to read the letter-coded output. It will also show changed config files. Status with a digit "5" in them means a changed file, for config files that's ok though you'll decide yourself in each case, for binary program in .../bin, .../sbin, or library files ending in .so or .a this indicates either that the file is damaged or that your rpm database is damaged. Check your disk health status as well. Install package smartmontools (fools who don't have it always installed), and run smartctl -s /dev/hda for copious information. There's pages to be said about smartmontools, in short, check the reallocated sectors count, and the numbers for current pending sectors and offline-uncorrectable. Run a disk seftest. If -a gives no output, run smartctl -oon -son -Son /dev/hda once after boot. (And/or configure /etc/smartd or enable the smartmontools service, chkconfig -a smartmontools). As you see, plenty of possibilities, and none to do specifically much with SUSE. HTH, Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann is list0570 with the domain in header http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me.
