I have suse 10.0 installed on my dell latitude cpx p3 laptop. It has an
ATI mach64lm/dell graphics card and a 14.1 inch lcd monitor. I can not get the laptop to use a setting higher than what it defaults to: 800x600. I went into yast > sax2 and changed the make and model of the monitor to dell > and I guessed at the monitor (1200 something). When I boot it with puppy linux, the whole screen is filled. With suse, it does not fill the whole screen. I am trying to get suse to fill the whole lcd display on the laptop. Do I need to install a driver or am I using the wrong settings?

I had an HP laptop years ago that only filled the half center of the screen. I downloaded a firmware update and that fixed the problem. You could try a little experiment and add "vga=794" to your boot options. On a dell latitude, that increases the screen size of the virtual terminals. Also check that you also changed the resolution settings for the monitor in SaX2. If that doesn't help, use the gtf program to generate a custom modeline and give that a try.

Start SaX2, select LCD monitor, then the resolution 1024x768. This should be the correct setting for your monitor. If you want your terminal to have smaller characters add in the file /boot/grub/menu.lst at the end of the line kernel=... vga=775.
I hope this could help you.

I tried adding the line 'vga=794' in the menu options of the grub loader. If that was not the correct way, please let me know. I tried the lcd options in sax2 with no luck. It always defaults to 800x600. I have no control over screen resolution. I tried searching for other posts with no luck. Is there anything else I can try?

It could be the driver. What driver is being used in /etc/X11/xorg.conf on the 'Driver' line? The fglrx driver may work, but if not, or if you don't have that one (yet) then try vesa, and see that the 'screen' section lists the resolution you want in the 'Option' 'Modes' line, and see that in the 'Monitor' section, the correct (or suitable) horizSync and VertRefresh values are set.

Also, we have a laptop here that does the same thing with many distros, EXCEPT for Slax LiveCD. I have tried Ubuntu and Knoppix on it (Toshiba 4090 xDVD) and both come up 800x600, but with Slax, I change the driver to 'vesa' and configure the screen for 1024x768x16bpp and it works perfectly when I restart X. If 800x600 is the only resolution that X is finding that the monitor will accept, then it will/is reverting to that resolution.

I found this link:
http://en.opensuse.org/dell_latitude_cpx_j-series

Basically, edit the menu.1st file

Will post back results

Interestingly, that link tells me 'There is currently no text on this page'.. Let us know how it turns out

Ok, I will check the xorg.conf file for what driver is being used.

Also note: editing the GRUB or LILO configuration with the 'vga=' option only affects the text console (the framebuffer), not the graphical environment. The xorg.conf file determines how X will display.

The laptop display is fixed. I found the fix in opensuse.org under Dell. The fix is:
edit the file /boot/grub/menu.lst (as root). Change vga=0x314 to vga=0x317
run the command mkinitrd -s 1024x768
Reboot and now have a full size screen.