I have a Dell Precision M6700 laptop with an AMD ATI FirePro M6000 graphics card. This registers in YAST as a Cape Verde Radeon HD 7800M series display adapter both before and after updating my graphics drivers by installing the package fglrx64_xpic_SUSE132 - X Window display driver for the AMD graphics accelerators.
When starting my system (I have luks encryption on my volume group containing my root partition and swap partition) prior to the driver update the console text was in full 1920x1080 resolution and there was a blue/green desktop background with a padlock on it, requesting my disk encryption passphrase. After installing the graphics driver update the resolution in the console went bad (640x480 or less) and the padlock screen for entering my passphase is gone, replaced by a text console in bad resolution with green text requesting my passphrase. The resolution of KDE once it starts is fine though, however when I press ctrl-alt f1 to f6 to change console terminals, the console resolution is still bad, however the text is grey/white.How do I fix the resolution for my console terminals, including on startup, and how do I get my blue/green padlock screen back on startup and when entering the luks passphrase? The resolution at the GRUB bootloader is fine, it goes bad when I select to boot openSUSE. The correct resolution should be 1920x1080.
I tried that, didn’t work. However, next I tried editing /etc/default/grub and changing the line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=" video=1920x1080 resume=/dev/system/swapvol splash=silent
quiet showopts radeon.audio=1 vga=0x3d4 nomodeset" by adding the ‘nomodeset’ on the end and then running “grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg”. That seems to have fixed it. Is there any downside to doing this? What does the nomodeset command do?
**The newest kernels have moved the video mode setting into the kernel. So all the programming of the hardware specific clock rates and registers on the video card happen in the kernel rather than in the X driver when the X server starts… This makes it possible to have high resolution nice looking splash (boot) screens and flicker free transitions from boot splash to login screen. Unfortunately, on some cards this doesnt work properly and you end up with a black screen. Adding the nomodeset parameter instructs the kernel to not load video drivers and use BIOS modes instead until X is loaded."