Scrambled screen after installing Suse 10.1
 

Hello everyone. I'm a complete linux newbie and have decided to give it a shot on the recommendation of one of my friends. He burned me a copy of OpenSuse 10.1 on DVD. I was kind of hesitant at first, just because I've gotten so familiar with my Windows setup and know exactly what programs I like to use and all that jazz. He assured me that it really wasn't as bad as I was making it out to be.

Well, I'm installing it on a Toshiba Satellite L25-S1216, which is of course a laptop. He told me that he's set it up on plenty of laptops before and never had a problem. Of course I'd be the first one to have it go wrong.

As soon as I finished installing it, the computer reboots to start the OS. Everything looks like it is going fine until after the first Suse boot loader screen comes up, it goes to what I can only describe as "digital static". It's like the snow on a TV, except mostly a whitish-grey tinted with different colors here and there that flashes very quickly. Is this because I chose KDE instead of Gnome? Should I try to install it again using the other one?

I've tried searching on Google and Google Linux, various linux forums and also tossing my questions out on IRC, and have found nothing. If I could get any help on this I would really appreciate it. Thanks!

This is not a Gnome/KDE problem. Laptops are the very hardest computers to get working with Linux.

When it starts booting up and the blue splashscreen is showing hit the "Esc" key. You SHOULD get a look at the scrolling text of the system as it boots. Try the "Esc" key while the static is showing too.

This is probably a video card driver issue. I cannot find what video card this laptop uses but this link is to a guy running Ubuntu Linux on a similar machine:

http://cmccabe.freeshell.org/ubuntu_l25_s119.html

Look up somewhere what video card it is using and let us know. Can you get the laptop to boot into any kind of system at all, other than MS Windows?

Good luck.

C

It has an ATI Radeon x200 Mobile. I've tried to use Fedora Core 5 and got the same results. I booted Ubuntu and was able to get to a desktop, but when I tried to actually install it, the program just maxes out CPU usage for a few hours, then stops installing. I was running XP Pro just fine before this.

I just tried hitting escape while it is in the static, and nothing happened. The only thing I can do is hit the power button and shut it down. I just noticed that I can see a little box inside the static that should be my cursor, but outside of that I can't really see what's going on. I can do it when it is first trying to boot, and a lot of stuff scrolls by telling me what it is starting, but I couldn't see anything that failed.

Okay, I just noticed that there is a "failsafe" option when I go to boot. I loaded that up and am at a command prompt asking me to log in. This is better than what I had before, but I still have no idea as to what I should do here. What I need to do is get it up and running to a point where I can get a USB drive with drivers for my wireless card mounted. The only description on the specs page for this laptop lists the wireless as "Atheros 802.11b/g wireless-LAN". Sweet, thanks for the details, Toshiba!!

Aaaaaaand back to Windows I go.

Noooo!

I had the same problem (except that Ubuntu works fine for me?), same gfx card. What solved it for me was to switch the laptop off in that last installation screen ("hardware configuration", where you can set the resolution etc.). When I rebooted, SUSE came up unscrambled! Maybe "skip hardware configuration" (at the very top of that last installation screen) would have worked too, I didn't try that. The display works fine (actually with the same settings that it autorecognized during the installation, so it seems more like a silly bug than a real incompatibility issue).

same problem
 

I tried installing Suse 10.1 on my fairly new desktop compaq (don't ask me why but the idiots at HP put an x200 ati radeon in it) and I have the same trouble. So, what commands am I supposed to type at failsafe mode? I have no idea what to do. I'm gonna stay up ALL night until I fix it. I am just glad that Suse didn't butcher my ntfs like I expected it to.

Ok i didn't post enough info but I was in a hurry:

My desktop specs:
Compaq Presario SR1803WM,
Intel Celeron D @ ~3.2 Ghz
1024 MB of RAM (2 x 512 MB)
A very evil and crappy ATI Radeon Xpress 200 built in.
A fairly old Compaq Presario MV500 crt monitor.

The install of Suse 10.1 appeared to go just fine, but instead of showing me a graphical login screen, it's just a garbled up mess of random colors, but I can move a whitish block around with the mouse. That's all I can do at the "log in" screen. The only way I can get in is through the CD boot disk, under the Rescue option. Both normal boot and fail-safe boot give me a bad screen, but fail-safe boot appears to work and then quits, giving me a black screen with weird lines randomly placed across.

My main problem is that I can't print out any tutorials--I have no printer here that functions, and I can't seem to use "yum" command in the rescue mode. I might be able to copy a big file to a CD while working in Windows, and then copy it off a CD during rescue mode into suse linux. I'm hoping that there is a better way to fix this than downloading a 52 MB file from ATI's website. I've got dial-up :(.

Edit: I am alone in this. No google results have helped me because everyone else with this problem is somehow able to use "yum" and connect to the internet and even boot into some non-rescue mode.

Maybe it is something wrong with windows. One time I was playing my N64 emulator, in full screen mode as usual, and I noticed that the full-screen started having extremely roundish sides and it looked weird but didn't disrupt gameplay so I ignored it. But then after that day, when I restarted the PC, the splash screen of the BIOS was the same roundishness. But once I logged in to Windows desktop, the screen display looked normal. But everytime I play a game in full-screen it looks weird with round sides. Is this a virus that has affected the BIOS? I am almost tempted to delete Windows if I could get Wine and Suse Linux working.

Well, I tried re-installing Suse and configuring my winmodem during the installation (I need internet for updates). That didn't seem to work or even try to dial up at all. It worked just fine in Redhat 9 after I installed some crap. I found an old external serial modem but I have no power supply for it. Now is it possible to get my winmodem working during installation? I really need internet access during installation so I can download the latest bug fixes. Does Suse 10.1 lack any winmodem capabilities out of the box? This is a very depressing day so far.

Edit: I now got to the point of being able to log into bash (no x11) but no modem is working yet. So I try to build a modem driver from source code, and behold, gcc has not been installed. I have no idea how to specify all the packages during Suse 10.1 installation. I would expect this type of failure from other distros. I can't even figure out which disc the main gcc is on. I'm sure as hell not downloading a 100 MB program. At least not at home over dial-up. With this type of nonsense we will never even scratch the corporate monsters of closed-source software.