I have a rather old monitor, a Viewsonic PS790. It is currently having trouble running 12.1. When I boot up normally I get a flickering or otherwise illegible screen. It is supposed to be set a 1200x1600. That’s the monitor’s native resolution. This is what it is set to if I start it with the install disk in the drive (f3 button menu below your choices is shown). However, if I ask it to boot up normally from the hard disk, it gives me an illegible screen. But I don’t think my current problems are only from the monitor.
I can start in fail safe mode, but then I don’t get KDE anymore, I get TWM or Icewm only. KDE in failsafe disappeared after I attempted to install the restricted media formats. I followed the instructions but got about 20 conflicts which I attempted to resolve correctly. It doesn’t seem to have worked and it took down failsafe KDE too. I"m in icewm currently and yast does not work. The menu screen comes up but it won’t start anything. I tried removing the packman repo and updating using zypper. Didn’t work. I’ve tried logging out and logging in again choosing KDE, but it doesn’t work. It immediately goes back to the login screen. I can’t see any errors it throws at me because it’s too fast. The bothersome thing is that I can’t even reinstall because of the monitor problem. If I choose installation, I get the garbled screen. This was a problem when I first tried to install. I get a thin green line at the top of the my monitor and nothing more. I had to borrow a monitor to install 12.1. Also, I get the same thing when I try to use a live cd with the computer. It seems to be set to the right resolution but it won’t display anything but the very thin line at the top. If I add nomodeset to the boot options it goes text only. It is frustrating. This computer and monitor worked with 11.4. Not well, but it worked. I have a Sapphire Radeaon 6570 video card but I have not installed the proprietary drivers though I did add the ATI repository. Thanks in advance.
Thanks Caf. Here’s an update on the problem. I decided the easiest way was to reinstall. It doesn’t take that long and there was nothing important on my system yet. So I changed the working monitor over to my Linux box and got it running again. It installed properly. The first thing I did after installation was install the proprietary driver. I used the one click method. It didn’t work, even after I ran aticonfig --initial. It goes back to the command line. Safe mode works though (I get KDE), but at the wrong resolution (should be 1680x1050 but is currently 1400x1050. And it’s prone to freezing fairly often. Usable but not nice. I imagine I could change the resolution in Yast. I know there are issues with the ATI drivers and 12.1. I have read a number of threads but haven’t seen a solution (one links to a solution in German which I can’t read). Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.
Ok, the disfunctionality seems to have been resolved. I was previously stuck using icewm at the wrong resolution (1400x1050 instead of 1680x1050) with my comp sometimes freezing for 5 minutes on seemingly small tasks, like closing a program. I had decided to uninstall the ati proprietary drivers (fglrx) in order to fix the resolution problem which hadn’t existed before I installed them. While doing that I noticed there were two drivers I could choose from, one being the 64 bit version. I had the non 64 bit version installed. I uninstalled it and installed the 64 bit one (xpic) and voila, a working, properly sized desktop. I’ve installed wine and going to see if I can game with it. That will be the last test. It isn’t perfect, some stuff is still slow, but it’s miles better than it was before.