first of all, i have openSuse 11 with gnome. here goes the story, i go to the controll pannel to activate the visual effects. i put a tick on enable visual effects having the default option, then the screen blinks for a moment, and i press close afterwards. however the visual effects are no turned on!! when i press again the menu of the visual effects the activate box is OFF!! also when i press the tick beside the option (eg Default)it automaticaly turns off the “activate visual effects” box!!
please help
i have a ATI HD2600 graphic card and i suppose the driver is install correctly with the install of the OS
The drivers for ATI graphics cards have to be installed separately. To do this you have to subscribe to the ATI repository and install the correct drivers. Then the desktop effects will work.
things got worse, i installed the drivers, i turned on desktop effects but the screen turn white!!! and now whenever i boot the opensuse after login the screen turns white!!!
then i tried to fix it by entering repair mode from the openSuSE DVD. after i restarted there was no option in the GRUB menu to log on to windows!!! (either to boot from Floppy disc)
so now i need to fix both openSuSE and Grub in order to operate wins again!
You should try pressing Alt-F1 and killing compiz. Then launch a terminal in Gnome and type “metacity” to get back the window manager. After that I think you can restart and it won’t appear anymore. I have no idea how to make Compiz work properly since I only have an nvidia card. I used to have an ATI radeon 7500 card that did that but with the newer opensource drivers it no longer white screens.
As for the GRUB problem, there’s a configuration tool in yast that can help you reconfigure GRUB. It should list the Windows partition if it still exists and allow you to put an entry. Hope this helps.
and something else i remarked. when i click on the edges of the screen (yes, in the white screen i can see the mouse cursor) shows me something i thing its a multiple desktop changer, where all 4 desktops are white (this is happening and after pressing ALR+F1)
it (partially) worked! when i pressed CtRL+ALT+F1 it brought me in a screen where in the end there where console like lines, i wrote my log and the i wrote metacity and it respond like this “window manager error: unable to open X display” what now??
I seem to have the exact same problem as offshore. I have a x1400 card, and couldn’t get the desktop effects to work, so I tried installing the ATI drivers. After the installation, the screen goes white, but it spins into a cube if I press Ctrl + Alt + left or right (so I assume the effects work now? rotfl!)
So I follow the above steps, switching between Ctrl + Alt + F1 and Ctrl + Alt + F6, and I get the same “window manager error: unable to open X display” error when trying to use “metacity”.
Btw I am a linux newbie, and I follow this gude to install the drivers ATI Installer HOWTO for SUSE/Novell users
After I do the “sax2 -r”, the screen is still blank.
To fix grub go to YaST > System > Boot Loader. Click on the ‘Other’ button and choose Propose New Configuration. That should find your Windows partition and give you a menu with openSUSE and Windows.
Note that it may drop your splash screen settings so it is an idea to back up the /boot/grub/menu.1st file or take a note of the settings in the openSUSE menu item.
offshore, did you see the link on the ATI page I gave you about the ATI express cards? ATI Radeon Xpress - openSUSE. I’m thinking that is what you have so there are some extra configurations needed…
i cannot get to my opensuse at all! this white screen appears whenever i open the opensuse so first i have to get rid of it!! and after fix the desktop effects!!
After opensuse is started and you see the white screen, press ctrl-alt-F1 to see a terminal.
Then type sudo /sbin/yast2 and enter root password. This will show op yast but in a terminal. It has all the same functions as the yast you are used to, accept you will have to navigate with tab instead of your mouse.
In yast you can fix your grub, and to get rid off the white cube, you might try to either remove your ATI driver or uninstall compiz. I’m not sure but I think this will automatically bring you back to metacity after reboot.
