I installed SUSE 9.1 a few days ago, and it's been working well. Recognized all my hardware perfectly, downloaded what it needed to survive, all that. However, although it recognized my sound card (ATI-IXP) it has apparently not turned it on. When I find it in Sax2, it says that it's Not Running. How do I activate it?

Also, I have a widescreen monitor (15.4". this is a Compaq Presario R3000T laptop) so I'd really like SUSE to be run in something like 1600x1050 resolution. It can definitely switch to that resolution, but when it does, some very weird things happen. The GUI is still there, but the screen wraps in strange places and horizontal white lines appear. Something that may be relevant - there was an error in YaST downloading the latest nVidia graphics driver, so I'm not actually sure what graphics driver it's using. It's not even an nVidia card, so not having an nVidia driver shouldn't make it cry, but still.

My third problem is that the system hangs during boot. It hasn't happened every time, but the only way I know to fix it is to reinstall SUSE. Confucius say, "Do not reinstall whole operating system to fix boot hang", but I'm fairly n00bish at this point and I really don't like using Windows. It always hangs at exactly the same spot:

"Starting CRON daemon...............done
Starting hardware scan on bootStarting Name Service Cache Daemon.....done"

Edit: I fixed this. Turns out if I pass it the boot parameter "noapic", it works fine.

Sometimes, when I ctrl-alt-del to restart, the detailed description tells me that starting the ALSA drivers failed. This may be related to my sound card issue, or it may not.

Um, hardware:
Compaq Presario R3000T laptop
512MB RAM
ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 graphics card
ATI-IXP sound card
2.4 GHz Pentium IV processor