I’ve just installed suse on my laptop, didnt change anything from the default in the installer other than selecting gnome and putting in my username/password.
The install finished fine, as did the auto config thing, it boots to grub fine but when I select the normal opensuse11 boot option it runs through a bunch of text then I get a black screen. When I hit ctrl+alt+backspace I can see an error - something about the monitor not being supported. When I login and try startx it just says x is already running on monitor0
Anyone know what’s wrong? I had a similar problem using the dreamlinux live cd, but the fix for that dosnt seem to be working for me here (it was something along the lines of ‘dkpg-reconfigure xserver-xorg’ then I could set my graphics card resolution and refresh manually). I also tried a ubuntu live cd and it boots just fine.
The laptop is a Dell Studio 1535, graphics card is an ATI Radeon Mobility HD 3400.
At the boot menu, type the number 3 in the data entry bar below. This will take you to a command prompt; login. Then
su
which will switch you to root privilege. Then do
sax2 -r -a
Configure the card and the monitor. If the graphics configuration gui did not come up, then try
sax2 -r -m 0=radeon
Failing that, then
sax2 -r -m 0=vesa
Report back. The radeon driver above is an open-source driver for ATI graphics devices, but it does not support all of them nor does it support 3D acceleration. You will probably want to install the ATI proprietary driver (fglrx). The above hopefully gets you into the gui where installing fglrx is easier to do. But if none of the above works, fglrx can also be installed from the command line.
It is also possible that it is the monitor configuration itself that is the problem. The above commands may give you the opportunity to correct that.
By the way, “dkpg-reconfigure xserver-xorg” is the (less capable) Debian alternative to openSUSE’s sax2. And the reason why you get the gui in a Live-CD is that it is using a generic “framebuffer” driver rather than the X Server driver specific for your graphics device; the former provides the basic functionality needed to install or demo, but not the full functionality of the latter.