Hi there,
I am running SuSE 11 with an ATI Radion x1300 graphics card and two monitors. Everything was working fine but suddenly my secondary monitored turned black (no signal). Later on i discovered that this was because of a crashing graphics driver. The root cause of the problem seems to be that the ATI drivers were in need for updating.
Anyway, I was lurking around this forum to find a solution but nothing quite solved it for me. I finally managed to fix this problem, and this is how i did it.
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IMPORTANT!
Back up your existing /etc/X11/xorg.conf to some location. -
Uninstall your current ATI drivers. I use the drivers from the ATI repo, so uninstalling them can be easily done from Yast.
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Remove the old xorg.conf: to do that, First kill X-sever (ctrl-alt-backspace twice), then hit ctrl-N to do a console log-in, then as root delete /etc/X11/xorg.conf.
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Restart your machine. You will actually now boot to the console login because X-server won’t be able to start without xorg.conf (that is why it is crucial to back it up just in case things explode).
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From the console, run as root “sax2 -r” to create a new “clean” xorg.conf
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As root run “/usr/sbin/rcxdm restart” to log back in to your window manager.
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Install the latest version of the ATI driver. I personally use the ATI drivers from this repo: http://www2.ati.com/suse/11.0
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As root run “aticonfig --initial=dual-head -f”.
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Restart the X-server by hitting ctrl-alt-backspace twice.
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Log in, and run “sax2 -r” as root and configure dual-head display from the menu. Then restart X and log back in as before.
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At this point i was still getting the a black screen on one of my monitors. Don’t worry. The ATI driver comes with a tool called “ATI Catalyst Control Center”. You can find it in your application menu (or by running “amdcccle”). It turns out that the driver was seeing 3 “monitors” instead of two. Two of the monitors were the correct ones that i have, and then there was a third one labeled “DDC Display”. The source of my problem was that the configuration was done such that the DDC monitor and one of my monitors were enabled while the third one was disabled. That is why it was black!
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From the ATI Catalyst Control Center, disable the fake DDC display, and enable your actual monitors and enable multi-head display on them (this is all graphical).
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You are done!
For me the last step had to be broken into two; First i disabled DDC and enabled single-head on the two monitors. This screwed up my resolution. Then i restarted X and configured it as a dual-head from catalyst and sax2, and it worked immediately afterwards.
On another thought, i assume this problem should be solvable by just updating the ATI drivers directly from YaST then doing the simple fix from Catalyst … but this didn’t occur to me, and the steps above are what i followed to fix this.
Anyway, this is what just worked for me. I hope this helps other people as well.