I installed Suse 9 pro on an old computer I had sitting unused. It is a Pentium 2 400 mhz with 128 mb ram. The computer had Windows 98 on it already. I created a new partition for the Linux. The install went well until Yast got to the hardware recognition. Sax detected the wrong graphics card. I tried to change the graphics card but the machine locked up and I had to reboot. After rebooting the graphics did not work and I had to go to the text based version of Yast. I have changed the graphic card 3 times now to the correct one and everything tests fine with the one I choose. I save the new choices and reboot. Every time I end up with my original configuration and not the new one. I finally did get the graphic desktop running with the incorrect graphic card by changing the resolution to the minumum. When I get to KDE things run slow, which I expected given the age/speed of the machine. Konquerer(?sp) and OpenOffice seem to be the slowest.

So I have two questions:

1. How do I get my correct hardware settings to save properly with Sax/Yast?

2. Which desktop/web browser/etc should I use given my slow machine?

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Try running xf86cfg or xvidtune to configure (as root of course)

Desktop Environments: IceWM,fluxbox,etc. Avoid KDE/GNOME

Web browser: You probably have the lynx text browser right now. You can download Dillo.

Thanks for the help.

I found this on the Suse website and it fixed my problem:

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Depending on how you start SaX2 (as what kind of user), the language will be selected accordingly. For example, the language variable for root is always English and if you start SaX2 as root, the whole SaX2 environment will be in English. If, on the other hand, you start SaX2 as a normal user, SaX2 will be displayed in the corresponding language once you enter the root password.

Proceed as follows to start SaX2 from KDE:

Press


ALT+F2

and enter the command


kdesu sax2

Click Run.

Enter your root password when requested then SaX2 starts. Starting SaX2 in such a way implies that you want to change, adapt, or optimize the existing configuration file /etc/X11/XF86Config.

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Now it is working well with better graphics. It also seems to have fixed the speed issues as web browsing is now much faster. Not sure how to explain that improvement by just changing the graphic card setting, but now when I scroll on web pages things go much faster without the delay and hard drive accesses I was getting before. Maybe it is now using the graphic card memory instead of virtual memory?