I have a 19" Samsung lcd monitor with an analog cable and an ATI 8500AIW video card. I have installed the ATI proprietary drivers (8.14) for the video card. Distro is Suse 9.3. After installing ATI drivers, I have configured fglrxconfig. The video is sharp and crystal clear. The only problem is flicker with certain background colors. This was also apparent with the M$ XP setup. With the M$, lowering the refresh rate solved this problem. However, I have been unsuccessful to setup the fglrxconfig to eliminate the annoying flicker.

First question: Is there a trick to the config setup?

Second question: Would a digital cable improve this condition? Both the monitor and card have digital capabilities.

Yeah, well, I did something similar: I edited the xfree.conf or what-was-its-name, i.e. the configuration for xfree (you use probably xorg, but should work there too). Go to the section where the vertical refresh rates are given (they relate to the graphics card, not the screen) and lower the upper value to your desired value -- probably 60 hz (e.g. 48 - 120 to 48 - 60) for all value pairs and restart X.

From all I heard: yes. No own experience, though.

/etc/X11/xorg.conf is the file to modify. Samsung had directions for the Linux setup. These directions were lame considering they told you to look up the ideal settings in the manual and they only reference xfree and not xorg. The part I had trouble with was the edit ing was done from command line in runlevel 3. When I went to runlevel 5 the screen behaved the same. After a hardware power down, everything is perfect, no screen flicker and perfect 3d. I don't know if there is any way to check the video settings to see what the system is actually operating at (there probably is). All of my video configurations are done by command line because that is the only success I have had with the proprietary ATI drivers. Sax2, control center and Yast have not operated well with the proprietary ATI drivers.

I'd guess the X-server wasn't down, next time try <Alt><Backspace> before switching to runlevel 5...

Indeed. Use the menu of your Samsung, there should be an entry of the current settings.

The Samsung entry was a good idea it gave me a true idea of what was really happening. I still get what seems to be random flickering on and off. The manual edit of xorg.conf is set to 60 Hz. The interesting part is when the monitor goes into a self config mode. It will do this when the screen is powered down or comes out of powersave mode. In m$ it is able to reset to 60 Hz, but in Linux it seems to be able to override this and go to 75 Hz. The best thing to do would be to manually configure the monitor to 60 hz.

Glad to hear that .
I wrote how I achieved that in my first post (post #2) in this thread .