I have a mini server I'm working on setting up, which has an onboard 82810E (i810) chip that uses shared system memory for video ram. I had gotten Suse all set up and working, running in a decent resolution, but it easily chewed up all 128mb of memory that the system had available, and started dipping into swap even. That was just a bit too much for me, but I really don't want to switch back to Win2k on that box.

So I took some memory from my main desktop system and added it to the server, so that the system had ~300mb of memory. Now X won't start. (Fails with signal 11, says there are no displays available, etc) My best guess is that the memory range for the shared memory changed, but Suse doesn't auto-detect the change, and I've re-run every configuration tool I can find, forcing the auto-configuration if there is one, and it doesn't detect the new memory range to use.

I must stress that it worked just fine before, I had the system booting right into graphical mode at 1024x768x16b, logging in, running programs, etc. (except for the whole running out of memory and paging to swap thing) Also the memory itself is fine, it came out of another computer that works okay, and I also ran memtest86 on it once it was in it's new home. My main problem that needed the change to system ram in the first place was the fact that Suse ate through all 128mb starting up X. This is with the default configuration/installation, (aside from mono and tinyfugue, and some patches from the auto-update tool) since I wasn't really sure what to tweak on or off in regards to lowering the ginormous memory footprint.


I don't really want to reinstall the OS if I add ram to the system. I know there's SOME configuration, SOMEWHERE, that isn't properly set up, but I don't know what it is or how to fix it. (I've run yast, SaX2, and others)


(I'd already replaced the 4gb drive with a 13gb drive, since Suse wanted almost 2 gigs of space and I have 3gb of data that needs to be available on that box.)


I've searched on here, Google, elsewhere, and can't find an answer.


Suggestions?


("helpful" "answers" like buy a real video card, change your drivers, buy a new computer, reinstall suse, go back to windows, etc will be ignored. Sorry if that rubs anyone the wrong way, but, eh.)