Video card issues

English Hardware
1

Looking for a little advice. My old machines motherboard died so I removed the hard drives and video card and put them in another machine. The “new” machine has onboard video. At the same time I upgraded to OpenSuSE 13.2. The upgrade seemed to go well. As soon as I tried to boot into the new system, it would get to the grub2 menu, and after selecting the only entry the screen would just go black. I removed the video card, an ATI Radeon 4650, and using just the onboard video, it booted right into KDE. I had to install LXDE because the onboard video sucks so bad, at it’s still barely usable( YouTube stutters at anything larger than a postage stamp).

I then popped in an Nvidea GeForce 8300GS. Same thing happens. I could get to the GRUB2 menu, but the screen would black out as soon as it would try to switch to GUI mode.

BTW, I couldn’t switch to a terminal with either card after the system tried to go to GUI. It seemed like the whole system would freeze up.

Next, I tried several live distros with both cards. No problem at all. Both seem to run at high resolution under Knoppix, etc.

Any suggestions? What would you like to see? I really don’t want to reinstall the entire system because I use apache and mysql pretty extensively, and I don’t want to go through all the configuring and repopulating the databases. Plus, I have some custom cron jobs that are a pain to redo as well. So, a fresh install would be my very last preferred option.

2

Interesting note: I downloaded a fresh 13.2 network install iso. I made a brand new partition (sda3) and installed to that. Same thing as before. Everything is good until you try to boot off the hard drive into the new install. Black screen with a dead keyboard, can’t get into a terminal(ctrl+alt+f1, etc.).

I guess I’ll try Red Hat. I’ll report back if it works under Red Hat.

3

Installed fedora 22. After that very long process, ;), same exact thing happens. I have a nice GUI all the way through the install process, but once I reboot and try to go into the new fedora install, black screen with a locked up key board. So I booted back into my original openSuSE 13.2 install using only the on board video. It can really suck using a ten year old computer! Oh well.