I have an Acer 5100 aspire series with an AMD turion 64 X2 and ATI Radion XPRESS 1100 graphics card.
I also recently installed Suse 11.2 (clean install with little trouble other than below).

I was having intermittent problems with graphics as the screen would just go completely black after boot sequence but before login menu. This never happened in Suse safe mode or windows XP on the same laptop so I think it's a software issue.

This morning, when I turn on the laptop I hear the sounds of the early boot sequence but no life for the screen and then I get a loud beep followed by two shorter beeps and absolutely nothing on the screen not even the boot selection menu!
Has my laptop monitor died?
Has linux finally broken my graphics card?
THANKS IN ADVANCE FOR THE HELP

You could reconfigure...

You might first run "sax2 -r"

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...4/#post3817929

If you were to use the command "sax2 -r -m 0=n" the correct module for your Radion card should replace "n".

Thanks for the post but I really can't do that as I don't have anything on my screen. My mistake when I said no graphics I did not mean no GUI for linux but actually nothing on screen (This is what would happen before but now it is way more serious).

BIOS...

The one beep, two beep is a BIOS error for the graphics card/screen.

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/fixthe...beep-codes.htm

You could try to boot a live-cd, perhaps the same openSUSE 11.2 you are using, or something like SystemRescueCD, to check that the is no hardware fault. If you can get a POST, try to look at the BIOS settings to see if you see anything that you can change for the graphic or screen.

If there is no hardware fault, the easiest thing may be to do a new clean install. If you succeed, you might use the command "lsmod" to see which module is loaded for the Radeon chip. If the system is stable, you can use that module; if not you can change to a more basic module or try to reconfigure with "sax2". If you were to use the DVD to install 11.2, you would have the ability to see and select the packages that will be installed.

The fact that the system will not POST is not a good sign, but installing linux should not have killed your hardware.

The next thing you might try is to clear the BIOS by setting the right jumper on your motherboard. You should see your system manual or google for the details.

I will try this and yes the indications are indeed that there is something up with the BIOS/video card. For the record I am chalking this one onto Suse 11.2 big suse fan (5 years defending it) but may switch to Ubuntu after this

No distro is fullproof...

You can go over to Ubuntu, but the fault may be a bug common to several newer distros. Did google tell you anything about this Aspire model or the Radeon chip and linux? What is the exact Aspire model number?

This is clearly a hardware problem if you never see *anything* on your computer after powering it on, and it's highly unlikely to have anything to do with the fact that linux is installed on the machine.

Yeah now it is a hardware problem but I'm claiming it was initially a software problem that may have led to the problem. No sense in crying over spilled milk though is there??

And it is still highly unlikely (though, admittedly possible) that a driver would have been able to do have this effect on your laptop.

Adam