Suse goes to text mode after ATI rpm install
 

I found suse 8.2 profesional at best buys in the clearance rack for $6 so I bought it. I load it onto a fresh harddrive in text and it loads fine. When it reboots it is in 640x480 . I load the Nforce rpm for my A7N8X mother board and reboot. It's still in 640x480 when I reboot ..but now it will connect to my router and the internet. Then I download the RPM for my video card ATI 9200 load it and reboot. And it's in text mode !! when I type startx I get an error message. Is there any way to roll back or do I have to re-install it again .. I've tried this twice. I hate 640x480 4 color ...but I hate text worse .. I don't know how to do anything in text ..

bump ... Please:cry:

Try running sax, or sax2. This is a graphical interface that lets you set up your xserver, but will run from console.
There's no reason you should need to reinstall just because X isn't working for the moment.

How do I run SaX or Sax2? Do I need to log on as me or as Root? I've tried typing in SaX at the command line and nothing happens. I'm a
:newbie: at command line. I run Linux RH and Mandrake on other computers I have but it's always in X. I have a hot swap bay on this computer and I just swap out hard drives to install a new O/S. If you don't mine type everything I need to type at the command line. I have used the whereis command, startx but that's about it. Thanks for your time

you have to go on init3. type "init3" and than "fglrxconfig". Thab you can choose between many options.

fatal server error
 

this is the error message after I go through and configure. I type in startx
and get.

fatal server error
no screens found

:cry:

if you're already logged in as a normal user (recommended), type "su". You'll be asked to provide the root password.
After this, type "sax2" (it may be just "sax" for 8.2, though I'm not sure. "locate sax | grep /bin" should find it).
You should be presented with a pseudo-GUI interface with options to change your video card, monitor, mouse and resolution. It's pretty straight forward from here.

This helped a lot !!!
 

It's sax2

the only problem is that the right driver is not installed
for the 9200 card. When I go to the ATI site it has 3 different
drivers available. How do I find out which version of XFree86
I have. Thanks for all of your help !!!!

you da man !!!!
 

This gets me to where I can at least have some graphical interface !!

Re: This helped a lot !!!
 

type "XFree86 -version" into a terminal

Wow do I feel stupid .... Thanks:scratch:

No reason to feel stupid.

As a side note.... most programs include an argument which will give you the version, but there are different arguments for different programs. XFree86 uses -version, but others may use --version, -v -V, or whatever they feel is appropriate. Using -h, -help, or --help will often give you a list of arguments you can use. Only thing is you'll somehow need to know what the help argument is...

I'm trying to come up with working setting for my ATI 9200 graphics card . I'm running Suse 8.2. If I let Sax2 do the config I get an usable screen but the icons are hugh and the window overlaps the screen. I have tried the 9200 RPM's off of the ATI web site but when I select the video card in Sax2 the 9200 is not listed and if I configure it manualy I get a KDE window that has icons that are 3 times too big. Any sugestions ?

sorry I don't know anything about ATI. Nvidia has a single driver for all (or at least most) of their cards, so I just need to use "nvidia" as the driver.

When you configure it manually, do you make sure to configure your screen resolutions as well as the driver?
It seems that with sax, at least with my experience with it, you need to configure everything if you configure anything....even if you've already got one thing configured in a past session.
Maybe that's not clear enough....
Sax seems to delete all your past configuration when you make a change to it, so if you want to configure any part of X with it you need to configure everything....monitor, graphics card, everything every time. It's stupid, but that's what seems to happen.