After searching the forums here, I thought I’d share what I ran into with this. My specific hardware is an HP Probook 4535s, with dual AMD A4-3300/Radeon processors. 8gig of RAM, 700 gig HD (450 gig for Linux) and Radeon HD6480g graphics. Your mileage may vary.
Install went fine, but after reboot I got Ye Olde Black Screen™. The startup sound played, so I knew I was in the desktop, I just couldn’t see it. I hit CTRL-ALT-F3 to get a terminal (which was also a blank, black screen), carefully logged in as root, then did “shutdown -r now.” When it rebooted, I added “nomodeset” and was able to get in that way, albeit with a fairly plain-jane video mode. No 3D at all.
I opted for the factory/proprietary driver. I went to the AMD/ATI page and downloaded the Catalyst package and installed it. Works like a champ now, full 3D and all the bells and whistles.
Two things: that wiki page misses a few things; I’m not sure I can edit it, but I’m going to try. Otherwise, I’ll pass on my experience to the page’s maintainers. But second, I really wish SuSE would bring back the sax video config tool. I’m sure that my only problem with the included driver was that it was choosing a resolution not supported by my non-standard display on this laptop. I probably could have tinkered and edited config files to get it working, but it was quicker just to install the factory drivers.
It reads like the open source radeon driver does not support the Radeon HD6480g graphics. When I type ‘man radeon’ I do not see the HD6480g listed.
The openSUSE installer uses the ‘fbdev’ graphics, and typing ‘nomodeset’ when booting with ‘radeon’ hardware also often uses the ‘fbdev’ driver. So it appears the HD6480 is supported by the very poor performance (but high compatibility) ‘FBDEV’ driver but not the ‘radeon’ opensource driver. Its also possible the ‘vesa’ graphic driver may have worked with the HD6480, but its performance likely would not have been much better than the ‘FBDEV’ driver.
Glad to read the proprietary AMD Catalyst driver (fglrx) worked will with the HD6480.
There was an effort during one of the ‘student summer of code’ efforts about a year ago to create sax3 (replacing the old sax2). sax3 works to a very limited extent, but unfortunately the summer-of-code is over, the application was never finished, and I suspect it may die the same sort of death as sax2.