Installs Fine, But Doesn't Appear To Load..

Hello, all.


A point in the right direction would be much appreciated. I've been trying to get openSUSE 10.3 to work with my computer for more or less all day today. I've downloaded, burned, and used the 64-bit CD version with GNOME, and installed (I thought, but to no avail) successfully..

Now, it would seem that all goes quite well except that after the system re-boots for the initial logon, (after GRUB loads, and I choose to use Suse) Suse loads and at that point (before I ever see the desktop) my screen goes black.. And the green light on my monitor turns from green to the intermediate orange/yellow.. At which point I hear the nice startup sound of the OS.


And as you can imagine, at this point I'm simply unsure of whether or not I'm to blame, or if it's strictly some hardware issue. :unsure:


Ok, the system is a Windows XP box, from HP (a COMPAQ Presario) and it hasn't been modified from it's factory setup; an AMD Athlon 64 3500+ processor, ATI RADEON XPRESS 200 card, and a COMPAQ 17" FS7600 CRT monitor.. Suse detected the monitor, and chose to set it at a resolution of 24 bits, 1280 by 1024 and with an aspect ratio of 15/3 (15/3, I believe, but am not sure now.. It might not be.).

What I'm hoping for is a dual-boot configuration. Does anyone know what could be the cause of this? A driver issue is all that I can come up with, but being new to Linux, am not sure where to go or what to do next.

Usually the monitor light changing colour means the selected resolution is too high for it. If you have another monitor handy, the easiest way might be to use it temporary, then use YaST to bring down the specs to something the original monitor can handle.

Thank you.


But unfortunately I don't have any other monitor with which to test/work with. Is there another way, because I've tried re-installing with lower specs, but perhaps they didn't take somehow.

You'd have to get into the CLI and run sax2. Add the character 3 to the boot options and it will boot to a text login. Then after logging in as root, run sax2. It's been a while since I had to do this so I don't know if you need any other options for your Radeon, maybe someone else can say.

I couldn't get that to work last night. Trying to run it from the command line caused the screen to black out again.

But today I was able to nab a friend's extra monitor to use , (a 17" Gateway LCD), though no matter what the same issue is repeating. Been re-installing with different lower-settings, but simply still getting a no-go. What's really confusing is that everything works fine during every step of the installation. Does it sound like there's anything else you could suggest? I'm kind of up a tree on this one. It just seems like there must be some way to get it going.

Maybe try a different video card?

Are you able to run the text-prompt (the black screen with the white text)?

If you can, you will be able to search different files for errors.

If you are able to get into the text-prompt, run the following command...

cat /usr/log/sax.log

...And check the lower portion of the output for any errors. If you get any, would you mind posting them?

The more information on the problem, the better.

No, there were no errors. And unfortunately getting a new card isn't an option right now.

It just seems so odd though that everything else displays fine at 1280x1024 at 24 bits, but it goes blank at that one point. Since it sounds like the issue is my card, is there perhaps some component of the distro that I could in-effect disable that might be causing the difference? Like maybe an effects package. If so, how?


Thanks guys,

The problem with the screen turning off sounds like a driver issue.

Try looking at this article on the SUSE website:

http://en.opensuse.org/Radeon

I'm really unfamiliar with Radeon, but maybe the article above will help.

But for this one, you have to be sure that you're using the Radeon X11 Driver.

I make this suggestion because I have doubts HP did not have a graphics chip on the motherboard.

Run lspci. Look for one VGA entry. If there are two VGA entries you might have a BIOS setup issue.