I have just installed suse 9.3 on my laptop -compaq Presario v2000,1.6GHz,256 ram. my problem is installation works fine and all.... but when i boot to run suse ( am doing dual boot) everthing goes well but at the end i get a blank screen. Now.... when i press the Fn+F3 key to switch to an external monitor ( the laptop screen flushes and for a fraction of a second i can see all the desktop icons, but when i connect to the extenal monitor it reads "out of range"

I gather this has to do with the screen resolution, i set my resolution to 1024x768 during installation (and my laptop can support even higer resolution-confirmed 1240x768). Previously i ran Debian sarge with 1024x768 resolution and knoppix live cd as well and all were fine especially Knoppix. Debian trumatized me i wount talk about it.

So why woun't suse cooperate??? Debian is worse than suse am sure of it already especially for novices like me, it did give me lots of problems but not with the resolution

Any suggestions are welcome

Meaning that you get a signal on the screen from the boot progress, but as soon as the X server starts, it gets black?

In this case, boot into runlevel 3 (on the grub menu, open a prompt for additional bootparameters (F2 or F3) and type '3', then boot). Now login as root and type 'sax2' to run the graphics configuration. Enter the parameters for your monitor correctly. After testing and saving, type 'init 5' to change into runlevel 5.

I am having the same problem with suse 10 on a sempron 2900 with a GeForce2 MX400 64MB. I set the resolution to 1024x768 duing the install, a resolution that works on mandriva as well as windows. Booting in to runlevel 3 gives me a command prompt, but when I run sax2, the screen simply blanks out. Help me please!

Try running sax2 with one of its options. Do "man sax2" to learn the options.

For example, maybe something like "sax2 --vesa" or perhaps "sax2 -l"

Thanks for you replies here, but i have been unsucessful with all sugesstions. When i use yast to configure my Monitor and grafics card, yast asks for parameters such as Ver & Hor. dimensions in (mm) of my monitor, i provide them and set the Vertical and Hor. frequncies to the ones detected by knoppix live cd and finalize the settings. However i recieve a message " monitor [0]: no DDC found, unknown monitor ...." and asks if i want to configure monitor manually.

I also noticed (somehow i dont know what i did ) that suse starts with a default resolution of 640x480 which is not supported by my G.card, Sometimes yast show that my resulotion is 1024x768 when i reprobe it shows 640x480 ??? confusing here very!

I'd be surprised if 640x480 is not supported. This resolution may be used as a fallback option because of problem with the higher setting. If your system already starts with this low resolution, you may need to change the vga parameter in /boot/grub/menu.lst. Add vga=0x316 to the kernel options. This should give you 1024x768 resolution on the boot screen.

Keep trying to find monitor settings that Sax2 does accept. You may need to have a look at your monitor's specifications to find the correct settings.