I just purchased SuSE 9.1 Personal and installed it next to Windows XP and every thing is working great except one thing. When I log on KDE an error message pops up saying that it couldn't detect my monitor's x and y geometry and it ask if I want to try now and when I say yes the screen goes black and I'm forced to reboot. And when I try booting up in safe-mode where I just get the console screen without loading the x server, I try to run sax2 to change my video settings but instead the screen goes black when I try running it. Now before this I had SuSE 9.0 that I downloaded from the FTP server for free and it had no problem with any of my hardware. So why would a store bought SuSE 9.1 have a problem when 9.0 didn't. I'm pretty new to the LINUX world, so could the new 2.6 kernel have any thing to do with it. I have a nVidia video card, the thing is SuSE only provides the 2D driver and you have to run the YOU update program to download the 3d driver from the nVidia web site. I'm wondering if doing that will fix all my problems or if this bug is unrelated to the driver. Any ideas would be appreciated.

You do not want to use sax2 just boot into it and get the nvidia driver and set it up according to the instructions. If they work with 9.1, I'm not really sure.

Running sax2 and other tools that configure X will undo your settings.

Never mind I have it figured out. I have a nVidia GeForce2 MX 400 video card and my monitor says "magview" on the front of it. I think it was a combination of those two pieces of hardware that was giving sax2 problems. Because I tried removing my video card and plugging my monitor into the default integrated video port on my mother board and sax2 was able to load the only thing is it still doesn't detect my monitor. I ended up whipping out my monitor manual and manually entering the display size, sync, horz. and vert., and made sure it was 56hz when choosing the pixels. Even though it was plugged into a different video I still picked nVidia as the driver. Than I installed the nVidia driver manually from there web site. After that I turned it off put the video card back in and switched the monitor cable back to my card, turned it on and it seems to works. Any time I would try to use sax2 with it would get confused as f*ck when using both hardware together. Well, that part works so far I was able to reboot back to SuSE and every worked, except one thing. The damn fonts where tiny as a son of a bi*ch. After and hour of online research, I found that if the display size was wrong it would cause small fonts. Eventually I figured out how to manually edit the XF86Config in the program called Kate than squinting really hard I was able to find the monitor section and changed the display to 310mm(h)x235mm(V). After that every thing worked great. Figures I have to have the worlds most odd ball hardware to get any thing to work.

Now I have a new problem, not so much a problem as more of an annoyance. When you install SuSE it give you a nice eye candy progress bar for your boot screen as SuSE is booting up. Well, I ended up installing SuSE with no video card and just my 1 mg onboard video memory, so I had to use some cheap ass graphic version to install SuSE. And instead of that pretty progress screen with a lizard and a progress bar and get just plan text like in the old days with LINUX just text showing what's loading when you boot up.

Do you have any idea how to bring that pretty green progress screen back?

here is my grub config file.
/boot/grub/menu.lst

color white/blue black/light-gray
default 0
timeout 8
gfxmenu (hd0,1)/message

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: linux###
title Linux
kernel (hd0,1)/vmlinuz root=/dev/hde1 showopts splash=silent desktop
initrd (hd0,1)/initrd

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: failsafe###
title Failsafe
kernel (hd0,1)/vmlinuz root=/dev/hde1 showopts ide=nodma apm=off acpi=off vga=normal nosmp noapic maxcpus=0 3
initrd (hd0,1)/initrd

I looked at my file and compared it to yours and noticed the only difference where something where in different spots and that some parts referred to different hard disk, because I have LINUX installed on my second hard drive. So I decided to boot up from the LINUX CD and read what the settings would have been had I continue with the fresh install. I noticed a difference in what the new file would have been and wrote it down. Than I rebooted and took the disk out. I started up SuSE logged on root and went to the file with YAST. I clicked on the button to manually edit it. So here's what mine looks like now...

# Modified by YaST2. Last modification on Sun Jun 6 18:23:36 2004


color white/blue black/light-gray
default 0
timeout 8
gfxmenu (hd1,1)/boot/message

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: linux###
title Linux
kernel (hd1,1)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdd2 vga=0x317 splash=silent desktop resume=/dev/hdd1 showopts
initrd (hd1,1)/boot/initrd

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: windows###
title Windows
root (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: failsafe###
title Failsafe
kernel (hd1,1)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdd2 showopts ide=nodma apm=off acpi=off vga=normal noresume nosmp noapic maxcpus=0 3
initrd (hd1,1)/boot/initrd

The part that it was missing was vga=0x317 right after root=/dev/hdd2

After putting in vga=0x317 I saved it and rebooted. After that I got my pretty little lizard with the progress bar. Seems like when I ask for help I end up figuring it out my self. On the good side I learned a sh*t load of stuff today.