Screen goes blank after reboot

Hi!

I downloaded Opensuse 11.0 with kde4.1 packages. The Live CD ran fine. Hence I thought of installing it. I have Acer Ferrari 4000 with the following components:

  1. AMD Athlon 64
  2. 1GB RAM
  3. 120 GB HDD
  4. ATI Mobility Radeon X700 with 128MB on board.

The initial installation went on smoothly. Then the installer asked to restart the PC. I did the same. When I restarted, I could see the beautiful splash screen with the loading indicator. By the time the indicator reached the halfway mark, the screen went blank. I restarted but found it to behave similarly. I believe the issue lies with the graphics card. Can someone help me in correcting it? Is there a way to install fglrx drivers when the system is in this state? Other distros (Ubuntu and Linux Mint) run absolutely fine. Please help.

I have a completely different system, having the same behavior though with an ATI Mobility. So i suggest to try to start up, enter a console go to runlevel 3 and edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf to change the driver from “rage” to “fbdev” which is the standard linux framebuffer driver. then go back to runlevel 5 and if that works you found the guilty section.

alternatively you can run sax2 from the console, but with me i got “Your display could nopt be opened” and so it did not work, again only a black screen with Sax2.

Thanks Peter! But right after I had opened this thread, I read another post on sax2. SO I tried that and it worked. Now the problem is that my display is capable of 1280x800 resolution, but the vesa has a maximum of only 1024x768. I want to change this.

Thanks again!

I am driving 1152 x 768 with the vesa. Just edited the values into /etc/X11/xorg.conf and it worked.

The resolution you can get depends on the framebuffer support in your graphics device. If you install the hwinfo package and as root do “hwinfo --framebuffer” you’ll see the modes.

Why don’t you just install fglrx? The repo is here http://www2.ati.com/suse/11.0/

Thanks mingus725. Well with the fbdev it might be true as Suse complains when I go to the “Monitor and Screen” panel that this would not work, though it still does. I will give fglrx a shot, but I fear the worst as my gc seems to be a little out of control which is not that unusual with the ATI Mobility Rage LY as I found out through the internet. There seems to be a bunch out there with the same bug and the gods of hardware has hit me with one of them. But it would not make sense to change on a '92 laptop with 667 Mhz as long as you can get it to work in any way.

Got it. IIRC there are one of two open source drivers for ATI cards? radeon is one, I don’t remember what/if the other. Worth a try over the framebuffer?

Well funny enough, fglrx doesn’t seem to exist for the PPC version.

I dunno if this applies to your card or not . . . there is the “radeon” open source driver which is installed with the xorg-x11-driver-video package. But there is also another driver called “radeonhd” being developed by Novell for AMD; it is in its own package in the repository, plus there are a couple of packages for fine tuning the drivers.

Also, if you haven’t done so yet, might give a try with hwinfo as mentioned above. Years ago (too many, ugh) I first cut my teeth on linux on one the the earliest laptops (masochist). Forget about any of these fancy drivers we now have; it was vesa or framebuffer. I had to do a fair degree of manual bit twiddling in X to get the modes defined, and I had to feed the kernel the mtrr to map the video to memory, but eventually framebuffer worked fine for me. Just fwiw.