I have an old (few years) NEC Ready 9890, PII 400MHz, 8G HD, etc. running Win XP. I have had some severe problems with installation of SuSE Linux 8.0 culminating in a strange, harrowing crash experience. For starters, I have no problem installing if I do not run the GUI (X or KDE, etc.). However, if I attempt to install the graphical environments, everything will appear to go as normal, YaST will be very kind and never complain, until all the data from the CDs has been loaded and the system is restarting for the final time. Without warning, as the system is initializing hardware (I'm assuming that is what it is doing....there are little pictures of keyboards, etc. on the upper right) the screen goes BLACK. The 3 finger salute will not work. Here's the kicker....EVEN PUSHING THE POWER BUTTON does not restart. I have to UNPLUG the computer. Now, this can't be good for my machine and, after a few of these crashes, I have suspended my attempts to install KDE or X-Windows. Does anyone have ANY idea what could cause this? My computers runs windows just fine, and I have never experienced a crash that requires unplugging before. I am assuming that this is some sort of hardware problem, but I am perplexed since this has never occured in any other setting. Thank you, Greg

Could it be your video card??? Maybe you want to check with their website to see if your video card is compatible with SuSE! Lawrence

have you tried using any other distros? maybe its something w/ suse, although it does sound like its probably your video card. never know tho. i'd try mandrake and see what it does.

The power button not working doesn't mean much. Modern comps send a signal to the running os when the power button is pressed, and do nothing more. If the os decides to ignore the signal (not supported/not configured/disabled/etc), nothing happens. Try keeping the power button pressed for several seconds, that will usually cause a forced power off (you may need to enable that in bios). Also, ctrl-alt-del usually never works in x, so I would guess you simply lack the right video driver. Boot with a different initlevel (3 should be fine) to get to text mode login, then config your xfree.