I downloaded 11.2 the first week it was released, and spent several days trying unsuccessfully to get it to install on my AMD 64 notebook with ATI graphics and ATI chipset. I had all the problems described by others and then some (frozen installations, black screens, inability to log in, inability to use YAST, network problems, freezes, etc.). It was an absolute nightmare for me, and I can’t imagine how bad it must have been for a first time Linux user. :shame:
So I eventually switched over to Ubuntu 9.10, and found that to be an outstanding distro, though definitely not without a few bugs here and there.
I had been using Open Suse since version 10.1 and knew that these problems in 11.2 were not at all typical. And this suspicion was reinforced when I bought an Intel Core 2 Duo laptop with Intel graphics last week. 11.2 installed absolutely flawlessly, and I’m amazed at what i was missing. 11.2 is quite an excellent distro too, and I think I’m finally ready to come back.
So my question is, has anyone figured out how to get 11.2 installed properly on an ATI-based notebook yet? And if so, what am i gonna need to do? Also, have there been any patches released to deal with these problems or is this saga still ongoing? Should I wait a few more months?
Further to caf4926’s post, … some openSUSE-11.2 users with “legacy” ATI hardware have found they get better behaviour on openSUSE-11.2 from the open source radeon and radeonhd drivers if they use the updates from the X11 : XOrg repository. That repository is here:
… and the rpms that some of us found gave better behaviour are these apps:
mesa
xorg-x11-driver-input
xorg-x11-driver-video
*]xorg-x11-driver-video-radeonhd
and possibly ( ? ) others for a 64-bit openSUSE ? … (I tried them on a 32-bit PC). One caution - that tends to be a cutting edge repository, so there is always a risk it will make things worse when a cutting edge release has a bug.
Thanks much Old CPU. I’m assuming that all the problems I had were related to the Radeon HD graphics driver being incompatible with my older (200M) graphics chip?
Seems like there was a lot more going on than just that, and I actually did change the driver back to the regular radeon driver, but still had a ton of other things going wrong that seemed far beyond the scope of just a bad display driver.
Also, I believe that my system switched itself back to the radeon HD driver at some point, and IIRC that’s about when I gave up.
I have an extra hard drive and some spare time though. Maybe i will give it another go using the info in the linked thread. Thanks much for the help.
I am using openSUSE 11.2 with ATI Radeon XPRESS 200M, it was full of
problems, but after running ‘sax2 -r -m 0=radeon’ and adding the Xorg
repository and updating it seems fine, I don’t get the black screen at
login anyway, and most of the desktop effects are working.
The main problem that I have noticed that remains is when I have left my
laptop on battery and it suspends itself, I can’t get it to resume.
It’s certainly working well enough to use, I am using it everyday.
My problem was that my only internet access was through a 3G modem and things were so screwed up, I could not even see the screen well enough to set it up. Now that I have a backup system, I can be a little more philosophical when things don’t go well.
My main question was whether it was even possible to get 11.2 running on a 200M system, given the severity of the problems i was having, and the answer seems to be Yes.