I dual boot Windows XP and Linux. When booting into Linux after being in Windows, the screen on my laptop has display problems.

Specifically, back when I used to run Mandrake 9.0, the screen would be uniformly dim, maybe 30% of normal, in text mode and graphics mode.

Now that I run SuSE 9.2, the screen is dim in text mode (gray text instead of white), and the green "done" words during boot are dim *purple*. In graphics mode, the screen is dim, but much worse, all colors seem to be negative and images are pixellated; for instance, the spinning waitcursor clock at X startup is a mishmash of green, orange, and purple and of seemingly lower resolution - like the pixels aren't quite lining up as they should. Needless to say, text in graphic mode is almost impossible to read - it's a mix of yellow and purple and again the pixels seem off somehow so I can barely read the text.

*Importantly*, the regular mouse cursor is not affected - it is a smooth black with a bright white 1 pixel outline, which the rest of the screen is unable to achieve.

This horrid condition will remain through several reboots in Linux, but somehow it eventually goes away after a reboot (after years running Mandrake I never did figure it out; I just squinted at the dim screen.) If I reboot into Windows XP, though, I will have the problem again next time I reboot into Linux.

In case this is important, SuSE installations are unable to determine my screen geometry, and I am prompted to enter it in mm. Usually I ignore this rather than guessing, and it seems to not matter! Mandrake didn't have that problem.

As a footnote, I ran SuSE 9.2 for a while without Windows XP on this box, and did not have these display problems. I then formatted, installed Windows XP, started installing SuSE 9.2, and found the display problems during install.

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HARDWARE
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HP Pavilion laptop, branded N5000 which is a codeword for "custom box that has hardware almost exactly like an XH575".

Video card: Trident Video Accelerator CyberBlade-XP (HP) [this is the name of the driver according to Windows; it's a vanilla, non-3d-accelerated card that came with the laptop]

Screen: no idea; how do I find out? Windows calls it "default monitor" which doesn't help much.

Thanks in advance for any help!

My first question is is whether your acpi is working correctly on this machine?

Some of the HP Pavilions with the phoenix bios don't work correctly with acpi.

Check your /proc files to make sure the acpi stuff is reading correctly. If you suspect something is not, you may try appending acpi=off to the kernel args(apm should take over). There is also a kernel module called omnibook which supports a lot of the acpi for machines with the phoenix bios (My Toshiba M35X for instance), and enables certain features.

If yours doensn't have pheonix, acpi=off may still help...it sounds like it could be a problem with the backlight in linux, This tends to stay at the setting it was on in windows after a reboot (or power off) on my machine.