Hi Everyone,

i am trying to get SuSE 9.2 pro setup and working on my ibm netfinity 5000. i have got it doing almost everything i want from command line at runlevel 3 now however i would really like to be able to use KDE from time to time and at the moment when i type "startx" at the comand line the screen just goes blank.

i know very little about video drivers or setting up X and KDE on linux so any pointers would really be much appreiciated.

I belive i saw somewhere that the onboard graphics is S3 Pro Savage.

TIA.

I'm not much of a SuSe guy myself, but I have a friend who is, so I can tell you that when using SuSe, Yast is your best friend. Try running 'yast' from a terminal as root, and there should be the option to configure the video card.

The video adapter, as well as the server itself, is pretty old. The video adapter only has about 1MB of video RAM if I remember correctly and the resolution is terrible. If you're using a newer version of Linux, X flat out won't work on that system. I noticed that X no longer worked with Red Hat 7.2 and higher. My guess is that maybe the versions of Xfree86 don't support the adapter any more.

You might try and configure the video adapter with YAST and try and select something like generic VESA adapter and manually enter the amount of video RAM.

Again, I know from experience that newer LInux distros don't support the video adapter very well in that server.

My advice...don't sweat too hard over getting the adapter to work. Try using a newer, inexpensive PCI video card if you want X to work.