Cannot input keystrokes, screen flashes blank
 

I'm blaming this one on trying to get my ATI AIW TV tuner to work, but it may just be bad karma.

The Symptoms
SuSE 10.2 [KDE 3.5x] appears to start normally, all the way to the KDE desktop. Pretty much any action after that causes the display/desktop/app to 'grow' to ~4x the regular size; then, pressing any key momentarily causes the screen to go blank (no keystroke data is accepted or displayed). I can maneuver around the screen by pushing the mouse pointer to the edges of the display. It's like using a 1600x1200 screen image on a 640x480-sized display -- you get to see ~1/4 up close at a time.

No recent actions give me a hint about where this issue roots from. I had been attempting to configure my ATI All-In-Wonder and made some changes to the TV Card profile using YAST2.[1]

"Repair Attempts"
I dropped to init 3 and reran SAX2 setup, thinking something display-ish got messed up in my YAST change(s). Going back to the GUI or rebooting gives me the same symptoms as above, consistently.

There's not a whole lot I can do from the desktop as no characters can be entered.
I can copy and paste root password to access SU privileges, and I can do mouse-specific actions.
I can open a Konsole, but can't really do anything ... like enter any characters.

I can startup in 'failsafe' mode to a CLI console, login, etc., but I'm a little short on ideas of where to start and what to do.

Any solution ideas?

Can I provide any specific logs or conf files?


.... Thanks


[1] Also taking suggestions on how to make ATI AIW VE tuner usable.
(installed GATOS drivers; not sure what to specify in xorg.conf sections, etc.)

Following up on my ownself ....

I thought that I had it sussed ... I found a message in my "/var/log/boot.msg" that pointed to
Said 'line 12' turned out to be related to my YAST changes in search of a solution for a working TV tuner card and appeared to be found in changes to 'modprobe.conf.local'. So I commented-out the tuner card mods in this file.

No luck. Same screwy symptoms. I thought that this would return me to the decision of choosing openSUSE or Kubuntu. But If I can't get SUSE to play nice, the decision will be made by default.

Still soliciting suggestions on this issue and on ATI AIW TV tuner config.

thx.,
nym