I'm blaming this one on trying to get my ATI AIW TV tuner to work, but it may just be bad karma.

The Symptoms
SuSE 10.2 [KDE 3.5x] appears to start normally, all the way to the KDE desktop. Pretty much any action after that causes the display/desktop/app to 'grow' to ~4x the regular size; then, pressing any key momentarily causes the screen to go blank (no keystroke data is accepted or displayed). I can maneuver around the screen by pushing the mouse pointer to the edges of the display. It's like using a 1600x1200 screen image on a 640x480-sized display -- you get to see ~1/4 up close at a time.

No recent actions give me a hint about where this issue roots from. I had been attempting to configure my ATI All-In-Wonder and made some changes to the TV Card profile using YAST2.[1]

"Repair Attempts"
I dropped to init 3 and reran SAX2 setup, thinking something display-ish got messed up in my YAST change(s). Going back to the GUI or rebooting gives me the same symptoms as above, consistently.

There's not a whole lot I can do from the desktop as no characters can be entered.
I can copy and paste root password to access SU privileges, and I can do mouse-specific actions.
I can open a Konsole, but can't really do anything ... like enter any characters.

I can startup in 'failsafe' mode to a CLI console, login, etc., but I'm a little short on ideas of where to start and what to do.

Any solution ideas?

Can I provide any specific logs or conf files?


.... Thanks


[1] Also taking suggestions on how to make ATI AIW VE tuner usable.
(installed GATOS drivers; not sure what to specify in xorg.conf sections, etc.)

Following up on my ownself ....

I thought that I had it sussed ... I found a message in my "/var/log/boot.msg" that pointed to
Said 'line 12' turned out to be related to my YAST changes in search of a solution for a working TV tuner card and appeared to be found in changes to 'modprobe.conf.local'. So I commented-out the tuner card mods in this file.

No luck. Same screwy symptoms. I thought that this would return me to the decision of choosing openSUSE or Kubuntu. But If I can't get SUSE to play nice, the decision will be made by default.

Still soliciting suggestions on this issue and on ATI AIW TV tuner config.

thx.,
nym