oS 12.1 -- nVidia

It became clear that by default, openSUSE 12.1 wasn't quite handling the graphics on my old Dell pc perfectly.  I was sometimes getting a momentary garbled window when opening new windows, etc. At first I was willing to live with it since it wasn't much of a hassle, but then I decided to investigate further.

I opened up the YaST Control Center, and in the "Hardware" section, I clicked on "Hardware Information." This started a hardware probe that produced this window:

Brilliant. It also allows you to save the info as a text file.

In the "Display" section, I found: Model: "nVidia GeForce 6800 (0x00C1)"

Then I found this page at the openSUSE wiki regarding nVidia. It says:

The NVIDIA drivers can not be included with openSUSE because of their license. Fortunately for new users, NVIDIA has an openSUSE repository containing their drivers.

Then it details various methods for installing nVidia drivers in openSUSE. Very cool. I decided to try the 1-click method for "all NVIDIA current cards (Geforce 6 and newer)"; this started up YaST2, prompted for my root password, and installed the necessary repositories and packages. I rebooted, and that took care of that.