White Screen and System Halt in OpenSuse 11.4

English Hardware
#1

Hi, newbie to OpenSuse and Linux in general. Just installed OpenSuse 11.4 successfully on my machine (E-machines T6212). Previously attempted to install Ubuntu 11.4 on it as well. Both OS have resulted in my computer screen turning white with blue lines and the entire system freezing; unresponsive to keystrokes and even keyboard CAPS/NUM lights don’t respond. Only way I can get system to come back is to physcially unplug it, not even power it off with Power button.

I believe there is something with my graphics card that may be the culprit;

ATI Radeon™ Xpress 200M - ATI Radeon™ Xpress 200M Specifications

Because for both OpenSuse and Ubuntu this problem came up.

However with OpenSuse I am able to get to the Terminal Screen via :
1- On startup typing ‘3’ into the screen and getting into ‘grub’ I think it is called.

I am not able to GUI.

I have read:Configuring Graphics Forum Page l in the forums here as well as looked into the Radeon page for the drivers.

I have also found the following thread here dealing with my particular graphics card but :

1-In my ‘xorg.conf.new’ file in my /root the correct driver “radeon” seems to be listed.
2-I added “radeon” to my 50-device.conf file in /etc/X11/xorg-conf.d/… directory

as per the guide in the forums.

Any other steps I should take?

Thanks.:sarcastic:

#2

Either use the xorg.conf file (old way) or the /etc/X11/xorg-conf.d/ files (the new way). In any case the file xorg.conf.new is not used

Follow the instructions in openSUSE Graphic Card Practical Theory Guide for Users to install the proprietary driver from a repository.

You can run yast in terminal mode to do this or use zypper. Just log on as root and type yast

#3

I’ve checked out the Graphical Card Practical Theory Guide for Users and I’ve attempted, according to my understanding, to follow each step. Still with no success. To my understanding I do not need a proprietary driver, but the ‘radeon’ driver should suffice.

In addition I have the following file(s) in my /etc/X11 : xorg.conf.install with the following entries:
Section “Device”
Identifier “fbdev”
Driver “fbdev”
EndSection

                                                                                                                                              Section "Device"
                                                                                                                                                  Identifier "vesa"
                                                                                                                                                  Driver "vesa"
                                                                                                                                              EndSection

                                                                                                                                              Section "ServerLayout"
                                                                                                                                                  Identifier "Layout"
                                                                                                                                                  Screen "vboxvideo"
                                                                                                                                                  Screen "vmware"
                                                                                                                                                  Screen "cirrus"
                                                                                                                                                  Screen "fbdev"
                                                                                                                                                  Screen "vesa"
                                                                                                                                              EndSection

Some extraneous info:
Version: 11.4.5.0-6.11.1.i586

rpm -qa ‘drive’ yields: xorg-x11-driver-video-radeonhd-1.3.0_20100512_80ba041-2.1.i586
xorg-x11-driver-video-7.6.52.4.i586
xorg-x11-driver-input-7.6-29.1.i586
virtuoso-drivers-6.1.2-4.3.i586
libreoffice-bas-drivers-mysql-3.3.1.2-1.2.2.i586
xorg-x11-driver-video-nouveau-0.0.16_20110115_b795ca6-3.1.i586
xorg-x11-driver-video-intel-legacy-2.9.1-8-1.i586

rpm -qa ‘*Mesa’ yields: Mesa-7.10-3.3.i586
DirectFB-Mesa-1.4.5-14.2.i586

glxgears yields: glxgears:Error: couldn’t open display ‘(null)’

Xorg -configure yields:
Fatal server error:
Server is already active for display 0
If this server is no longer running, remove /tmp/.X0-lock and start again.

Otherwise, I’m still getting the same problem; OpenSUSE loads into GUI, works for 5-10 Minutes then completely freezes.

#4

Did you try booting with the boot code ‘nomodeset’ ? You could try that with the ‘radeon’ driver commented out in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-device.conf, and NOT commented out, to see which if any works better.

Instead of the ‘radeon’ driver specified , you could also try either the ‘radeonhd’, ‘vesa’ or ‘fbdev’ driver.

There is also a bug report which may be relevant: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=678264

I think the X200 is an RS400/RS480 ? If so the bug report has this which ‘may’ be relevant < not sure > :


Workaround for R3xx/R4xx users (Radeon 9600/X300/Xxxx)
------------------------------------------------------

- disabled KMS by adding 'nomodeset' to boot options. 

- add the following section to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-device.conf

  Section "Module"
    Disable "dri"
    Disable "dri2"
  EndSection