For almost the past month now I have been trying to get SuSE 9.1 professional working on my Averatec 3200 series laptop with no avail. When I go to boot linux, it starts out fine. At the end, though, the screen goes black. It seems like it's going into standyby or something it seems like the screen itself is off.

However, I am able to switch run levels. Because of this, some people have suggested logging in as root and running yast and changing the screen resolution, but when I go to do that, it switchs back to run level 5, and the screen's black. If I switch back to yast, it's frozen.

A couple of days ago, I tried installing Red Hat, and that KIND OF worked. I am see the graphical interface on there, but right before it loads, the screen looks all psychedelic. After that it look semi-normal, but pretty choppy...like everthing's a little distorted. I tried changing the resolution, and it said I had to reboot to see the changed, but it didn't even change.

So the past few days I've been trying to work with SuSE 9.1 professional again to no avail. Is there anyone out there that has any more suggestions for me?

Thanks a lot,

Anthony

P.S. I was able to get SuSeE working just fine on my desktop, which is a couple years old...my laptop is brand new.

Ok, now I have SuSE 9.0 working perfectly on the laptop...anyone know why 9.1 won't work, but 9.0 does?

Interesting.
Did you check your config file itself to see if your hard ware was detected right.
Could you boot to run level 3?

9.1 detects the S3 Unichrome card and selects the unichrome drivers (http://unichrome.sf.net). The problem is that the unichrome drivers don't yet support the 3200 series! The author is working on it though.

The workaround is to override the video selection at install time to plain VESA drivers--then it works fine for 2D stuff.

so use the generic Vesa drivers... problem solved... I have an H pavillion with an ATI card and of course i don't have 3d acceleration ebcause it's f*cking ATI... but SuSE 9.1 professional is runnign just fine... it even told me that my Laptop was an HP Pavilion ze5200 upon installation... never seen that before!!

I have the same problem with my Averatec 3200 as well. I know that if I were to use Vesa as my video driver, everything would be okay but how do I go about doing that? Suse is so smart that it auto detects my video card and puts in the Unichrome driver for me. Please let me know how to stop Suse from putting in the Unichrome driver and use Vesa instead. Thanks!

Here is some information from a webpage of someone who installed Redhat on the same laptop: http://obsequious.net/tech/averatec-3225.php
The "DisableIRQ" option stands out. You might want to check it out.

Configuring the X Server

The final step is to set up /etc/X11/xorg.conf to use the new driver. The xorg.conf file generated by Fedora Core is almost exactly what you need; all you really need to do is tweak it to load the 'via' driver instead of the 'vesa' driver. The snippet below is an example of my configuration.

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "via"
VendorName "VIA"
BoardName "Unichrome (KM400)"
Option "DisableIRQ"
EndSection


The most important thing is to notice that "DisableIRQ" option. If it is not present, the DRM kernel module will register an IRQ on behalf of the DRI driver. However, due to ACPI IRQ steering issues, this can cause problems including lockups. So, don't forget the DisableIRQ option, at least in the current versions of the various software.

Did you already try to run the live cd of suse 9.1?

I didn't use the 9.1 live CD but I managed to get Suse 9.1 to work with my laptop. I did this during the first part of the installation. It'll look for hardware and all that stuff. All you have to do is go to the hardware settings and find the one for the monitor or display. The one selected by default for Averatec should be VIA. Change this to Vesa. After that everything should be cool. Remember, you must make this change before it asks you if you want to install Suse 9.1. I hope this helps anyone that has my problem and also thanks to everyone else that helped me out.