I installed Suse 10.3 without a problem on my Dell Optiplex 320 up to the point where I got congratulations and then the screen went blank. After a lot of fooling around I found I could boot in the "failsafe" mode and I edited inittab to set the default runlevel to 3, which works OK. But startx still resulted in a black screen. After several repeats, I tried following the installation program up to the last step, configure hardware, and when I chose to skip this, the system started up fine. However, when I start the GUI, I still get a message that the monitor, correctly identified as a Dell 828, did not report its x and y coordinates (don't know what that means), and would I like to I configure it. If I do, I'm back to the blank screen. If I leave it alone, things work OK.

The system information screen in YAST says I have a Radeon Xpress 200, but WinXP which runs fine says it is a Radeon Xpress 1100. I can't seem to get YAST to recognize this. I looked around for a new driver for this card, but haven't found one and anyway I'm not sure how to install it if I did. (FAQ on the Suse website point to a URL at ATI that is not operating.)

How to proceed?

Being in the failsafe mode start up sax2 by just typing sax2 and see if he give some more clues what the problem might be
Yoy also can make changes in sax2
Sax2 is monitor configure utilety
If every thing is oke save it.
And than type startx if everything is oke the xserver and kde start up


all the best

Ron

Thank you Ron. I was able to start sax2 from the command line as you suggested, with the following result:

Sax: initializing please wait ...
Sax: your current configuration will not read in
Sax: no x-server is running
Sax: will start own server if needed
SPP: prepare device [0] profile: Depth24
SPP: prepare device [0] profile: Radeon
SPP: calling device [0] profile script: Radeon
SPP: including prepared profile(s) ...

Sax: start-up

At this point the screen again goes black, and the monitor power light blinks, indicating no signal. I did Ctrl-Alt-Backspace and was able to recover the command line interface, from which I copied the lines above.

I assume there's a problem with the "profile script" but I have no idea where it is.

At this moment I have only one option more
Go again to failsafe mode log in as root
Try the command Yast as far as I can see it is total text mode but it gives
a lot options to modify the hardware

Where that profile scrips I do not no either



good luck

Dear Ron,

Thanks. Yast2 does start OK in text mode. Unfortunately, though, the video configuration part simply calls sax2. Which is where we came in. I will try messing around with the sax man page, but I am not too optimistic.

--Michael

Look to the color depth and refresh rate


good luck