OpenSUSE 11.3 on a Dell Inspiron 6400 with Mobility Radeon x1400 - screen flickers

[peteslater]

Anybody else having this issue?

Having installed 11.3 yesterday evening and enjoying it immensely, I turned the notebook on today to find that the display is showing odd horizonal lines.

Once the computer has booted and I have logged into my account it starts off fine but the more I use the machine, the worse problem gets. Until after roughly 10 minutes of use, the display is utterly scrambled -with lines appearing all over the screen.

Its an odd issue that I haven’t seen before and has marred my excitement about using 11.3.

The machine I am trying to use it on is an Inspiron 6400 with a Mobility Radeon x1400 card.

If anybody has any suggestions that please let me know.

Cheers.

[oldcpu]

@peteslater

Anybody else having this issue?

Having installed 11.3 yesterday evening and enjoying it immensely, I turned the notebook on today to find that the display is showing odd horizonal lines.

Once the computer has booted and I have logged into my account it starts off fine but the more I use the machine, the worse problem gets. Until after roughly 10 minutes of use, the display is utterly scrambled -with lines appearing all over the screen.

Its an odd issue that I haven’t seen before and has marred my excitement about using 11.3.

The machine I am trying to use it on is an Inspiron 6400 with a Mobility Radeon x1400 card.

If anybody has any suggestions that please let me know.

Cheers.

I’ve seen these symptoms with a different PC and different graphic card, where the PC was old, and its aging power supply did NOT have the power to drive the graphic card. Any chance this Dell Inspiron is an old PC and its power supply has degraded ?

[peteslater]

@oldcpu

I’ve seen these symptoms with a different PC and different graphic card, where the PC was old, and its aging power supply did NOT have the power to drive the graphic card. Any chance this Dell Inspiron is an old PC and its power supply has degraded ?

Thanks for replying.

The laptop was running fine with the previous verson of OpenSuSE and only manifested this problem after I had installed 11.3.

I assume it is a graphics driver related issue but the laptop is at home right now and I haven’t had much chance to diagnose the problem

[oldcpu]

@peteslater

The laptop was running fine with the previous verson of OpenSuSE and only manifested this problem after I had installed 11.3.

I assume it is a graphics driver related issue but the laptop is at home right now and I haven’t had much chance to diagnose the problem

You could try adding the boot code “nomodeset” and see if that helps.

I am still suspicous of a hardware problem.

[peteslater]

Aye, ‘nomodeset’ seems to fix it as per the instructions on this page: SDB:Configuring graphics cards - openSUSE

I updated my grub config to use this kernel boot parameter all the time and things are now much better.

Thanks.

[jaom7]

Sorry for this late comment,
I have exactly the same Laptop and graphics card (with 2GB of RAM) and openSUSE 11.3 running on it.
During the installation I only did a version update and not fresh install and everything worked out of the box on 11.3.

About the lines, sometimes I see strange lines between openSUSE initial loading and the KDE splash screen but is just for a second, then they disappear and everything is fine.
However I am not sure if I am getting everything out of my graphics card, I’ll do a brief test with some 3D games.

regards,