Hello, everyone.
I’ve been having an issue with my laptop. I’ve tried multiple distros and three of the four I’ve tried have given me a white screen at various points in installation (the one that didn’t was Puppy Linux, but I want something more robust than what that distro offers)
I understand this is a display driver issue. Currently, I’m running openSUSE 11.4 on my laptop. The video card for the laptop is an ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 (also known as an M7).
When I start the installation process, everything is fine, then when it restarts yast in the middle of the installation, my laptop gives me a white screen.
I’ve since hooked up a CRT monitor to it and it shows me that the installation process is still running, so I went ahead and finished the install and figured I could resolve the laptop display issue afterwards.
So, that was yesterday and I’m still having the issue today. I’ve searched multiple forums (including this one) and I can’t find a resolution that works for me.
I’ve tried changing the 50-devices.conf file, but that doesn’t do anything. I’ve also uninstalled the xorg RadeonHD driver, but that didn’t do anything either.
If I boot into failsafe mode, the display works fine, but I don’t want to have to boot into that mode because it shuts off a bunch of other stuff I would like to use. I’ve also tried the nomodeset boot option and I don’t get a white screen, but it hangs on startup (the progress bar gets about 3/4 of the way and just sits).
There is one thing that happens that’s kind of weird: if I leave the laptop alone long enough to make the display turn off, then wake it up, my laptop display works fine. If I close the lid and suspend the system, then open the lid, it shows text (I’m assuming everyone gets three or four lines of text after waking their system up from suspension), then goes to a white screen, but, again, the CRT shows everything is running fine.
The openSUSE wiki says that 11.4 supports my video card.
Can anybody tell me how I can fix my system or at least give me a good idea what’s going on?