adjust screen resolution
 

suse9.3 installed on (ready?) Compaq 1600. I had configured SUSE to start KDE automatically. Video on the Compaq is not up to what we have today. Machine boots ok, goes to welcome screen where I select manner of boot (normal, failsafe, floppy) .Selecting failsafe works fine and I get to a command line logon. Normal is not so good. After selecting nomal, I watch the loader finish off it's work with comments on the screen. Just before the logon screen, I can hear the relay in the monitor click and the screen goes blank. Sure seems like the system is trying to crank up the resolution just before logon and my hardware's nixing the idea. So I,ve poked around a little, found umpteen different suggestions for changing one conf file or another, even tried some, without success. I don't know if it's grub, xdm, kde or whatever that is responsible for the logon portion of code, but I need to instruct something to tone things down a little. But how? I assume that whatever I do will be through the command line, and being new, am very slow in moving around at the command level (that's why the gui), so path info would sure help. Anyone willing to give this a shot?

Hi!

The monitor switches off because it has wrong settings and cannot operate. You could go to Ctrl+Alt+F1, log in as root and run xorgconfig. If it doesn't work try emacs /etc/X11/xorg.conf . It's a config file so you'll have to work a bit.

/etc/X11/xorg.conf

Change the "screen" settings - (at the bottom) to some more conservative settings.
Depth is bit depth - try 16 - or 8 for a really old monitor.

Modes are the resolutions - if you don't want a resolution to be attempted - delete it.

Back this file up before editing it.

Boot into failsafe - select some more modest settings, and reboot into normal....

hi there,
me too faced this problem earlier......
Got through it using "xorgconfig".
But that time also i didn't find /etc/X11/xorg.conf
currently i'm on Redhat 9.......again its not there
If i remeber then at the ending step of "xorgconfig" it says that whether to write the changes to /etc/X11/xorg.conf or not...

could any one please tell me why its not there.........

regards

Still failing miserably
 

my xorg.conf has a number of "display" sub-sections. I changed all to 8 bit color, 640x480. Anything less and I'll need to find an ega card. When restarting in the normal mode the monitor still went blank. Must be something else that is causing this to happen. BTW, the text displayed during the normal boot procedure is much more than 640x480. And then the relay. Now While dinking around I tried "yast". I suspect yast may be unique to SUSE, I don't know, but anyway I use yast in the graphical mode for configuration. Guess what, yast runs level 3. Yast found my video chip as being a Cirrus Logic with 640x480 resolution and 8 bit color depth.
So I need to go further than xorg.conf.

Or....change video!

try to edit your xorg.conf in # Monitor section. Find lines HorizSync (in kHz) and VertRefresh (Hz) and edit them - make them same as your monitor has (you can find this values for example on web of your manufacture, or in some prog.). This may fix problems with screen-res and refresh rate.