First some philosophy. openSUSE is openSUSE, ie it sticks close to the opensource free software philosophy than most other distributions. Hence most proprietary drivers for hardware and proprietary audio/video codecs are not included with the as packaged CD/DVD/ . This is good for those who wish to follow that philosophy, but it does mean one may need to go to a 3rd party site for a driver packaged by the openSUSE community.
The sax2 command is there. If you get this, then its because either your syntax was wrong, or you did not have root permissions when you ran it.
Before even trying this, check to see if your installation media is good. Did you run the installation media check, which is an option when you first boot from the installation CD/DVD ? If not, do so NOW !
Also, before trying the command “sax2 -r -m 0=radeonhd”, you need to check if this is the correct driver for you.
You also noted you could boot in safe mode. I gave you some advice in an above post, about trying various boot codes to narrow down which one enabled your PC to boot. Did you try that?
Assuming you have tried that, and assuming you have identified the boot code, and assuming you are now applying the boot code, I recommend you boot direct to run level 3. Do that by typing “3” (no quotes) when the grub menu appears and the “3” will go into the options line.
Log in as a regular user.
Now before typing anything, NOTE that Linux is case sensitive. Be careful as to whether you use upper case or lower case. In my examples I am careful.
Then type:
grep -i driver /etc/X11/xorg.conf
what driver does it say you are using?
Then type “su” (no quotes, enter root password when prompted). Note if you now type “whoami” it should say “root”.
Then type:
cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.baknew
to backup your exisiting xorg.conf file.
Then type:
sax2 -p
and confirm that sax2 runs and confirm it recognizes your card. It should identify your card chip as either 0 or 1. What card does it say you have?
Assuming chip=0, then try one of the following. One of these should configure your card with the openGL (opensource, not proprietary) ATI driver (keep trying until one appears to work) … you will end up at an ascii/text prompt after it succeeds.
sax2 -r -m 0=ati
or
sax2 -r -m 0=radeon
or
sax2 -r -m 0=radeonhd
Again, you WILL end up at a text prompt after it succeeds. And note since it is “chip 0” that is “zero equals radeon” or “zero equals ati” (ie the number zero).
If those appear not to have worked (ie it kicked you out after doing nothing or gave you a zillon errors), you can try the vesa driver:
sax2 -r -m 0=vesa
And as a last resort (and only if the above appear not to work), you can try copying the installation xorg.conf to replace your existing non-functional xorg. You can do that by:
cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.install /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Now once you picked one of the above that appears to have succeeded, you need to test it. You do that by first typing “exit” to get rid of root (admin) permissions. That is important. Type “whoami” to confirm you are no longer root. If still root, type it again. If necessary log out and log back in to get rid of root permissions. Once back to a regular user, type:
**startx **
to test your X window. If it does not work, you will get error messages. Take a pix of those messages with your digital camera so you can tell us later what they are.
If startx works, you will be at a gui. Now open a gnome-terminal or a kde-konsole (it looks like a dos window) and type “su” to get root permissions. And then command an immediate reboot with “shutdown -r now” to test your configuration will survive a reboot. Do NOT type “3” this time when rebooting, but do type your boot code that you figure out previous.
