things to ask before next Ubuntu question/answer session:

-cannot get disk usage from root. partition reports root has some error warning.
-after suspend wake up, it shows a white screen. don't know any way to get rid of it
-flash player no longer working with firefox. somehow there is no sound but the sound system works

UPDATE:

looks like all those problems listed above are fixed before me having the chance to visit FreeGeek.

openSUSE is still not running. I think it's because gdm and kdm cannot run on top of X11 due to the driver incompatibilty with NVidia video card. I don't exactly know how to fix it, but i heard openSUSE 11 fixed that problem. so i'll check that one out instead