Scrambled display with Suse 10.1 & Radeon video

andrewstr · 05-26-2006, 06:58 PM

I just sailed through a smooth clean install of Suse 10.1. The problem is that my screen is just a jumble of colors and lines when I boot into X.

I tried sax2 at a console but it yields the same result.

Next I tried sax2-vesa and that worked but when I test any configuration I get the jumbled screen.

I tried sax2 -m 0=radeonold as per the release notes but that just freezes the PC after the "X" pointer displays.

The monitor is a Dell E772C and I selected that from the list and have chosen the lower resolutions just to experiment but nothing seemed to help.

The graphics card is a ATI Radeon XPRESS 200 which Suse seems to recognize.

I'm not sure what to try next. This configuration worked OK in Suse 9.3 but IIRC Suse identified the video card as a generic HP card.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Andy

jschiwal · 05-28-2006, 04:19 AM

There is program that can generate a modeline for you:
gtf <horizontal> <vertical> <refresh> -x

Put the modeline in the Monitor section.
The modeline will look something like this:

Code:

  # 1280x800 @ 56.00 Hz (GTF) hsync: 46.26 kHz; pclk: 77.71 MHz
  Modeline "1280x800_56.00"  77.71  1280 1344 1480 1680  800 801 804 826  -HSync +Vsync

It may be a good idea to remove the ".00" part. I don't know how X parses that part.

In the Screen section add the "_56" to the entries:

Code:

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Screen[0]"
    Device         "Device[0]"
    Monitor        "Monitor[0]"
    DefaultDepth    24
    SubSection     "Display"
        Depth       15
        Modes      "1280x800_56" "1280x768" "1024x768" "1280x600" "1024x600" "800x600" "768x576" "640x480"

The resolution and refresh rate I used are for illustration. Use your own values.

andrewstr · 06-01-2006, 11:33 AM

Thanks for the tip. I gave that a try and it didn't seem to work. I had the same issues.

I rebooted into Failsafe mode and ran sax2-vesa. After waiting quite awhile it told me that it had determined the best settings for my display. This time, instead of actually going in to look at and test the settings, I just went with its settings and the display came up just fine. I'm not sure why but it's working now. Very strange!