switching ATI driver for open source

I installed opensuse 11 on a old thinkpad its got an ATI video card and the ati driver was installed by default, when I first booted there was a big black line on the top of the monitor ( I am using an external monitor since the lamp died on the laptop).

All I want is to change the ati driver for the open source, the line doesn’t show on any terminal sessions nor the installation.
how do I switch the drivers without breaking anything?

thanks in advance

I think you could probably just go to YAST and search for “fglrx” and uninstall the two files and then reboot. If you are greeted with a blank log in screen, log in as root and run this command:

sax2 -r -m 0=radeon

Run sax2. And when you exit sax2, hit contol-alt-delete to reboot.

Are you sure you even have the ATI driver? If when you go to YAST and search for fglrx you get nothing, that indicates that you don’t have the ATI driver on your system. Unless you ran the installer, and you’d remember doing that.

In which case, this would mean that maybe you should probably try installing the ATI driver through YAST and see if it fixes your display problem.

Hi Irco,

Adding to the previous post, have a look here too : ATI - openSUSE

There is a one-click install (scroll down a bit) that should do the configuration work for you and maybe resolve the issue by giving a newer driver.
To reconfigure (if necessary) with the oss radeon driver you can use the sax2 command suggested by foresthill.
There are also other troubleshooting tips on the mentioned ATI page.

Cheers,
Wj

thanks a lot for the help, I think I had an older version of the driver, the newer one doesn’t show the line anymore. But is a good thing I learned how to move back to the os driver
thanks again