I have a system I'm trying to redo.

Dell Dimension 2350
Intel i845 GC
Suse 9.3

When I boot from either the boot ISO or from the DVD, Grub's Text menu shows up, but not the SuSE splashscreen. When I install it, which it will bring up YaSTfine, it installs the GRUB text loader, and no splashscreens until the login screen for SuSE 9.3 (running GNOME).

I've isolated it down to the i845 card. I've tried using a PCI video card to bypass the onboard, but SuSE won't finish the install correctly when I do that (probably can't determine which card is the correct one) If I use the PCI card, the splash screens show up right away.

Any ideas?

The login screen runs on an X server whereas the graphical splash-screen runs on a console framebuffer.

This sounds like either the i845 card doesn't support a console framebuffer device, or there's a clash between the console driver and the framebuffer driver, so the framebuffer was turned off. This won't cause you any problems (appart from a missing SUSE logo on boot) unless you want to run framebuffer commands from a text-mode console.

But you might take a look in /usr/src/linux/Documentation/fb/ for further information (from the kernel-sources package); this may provide you with things like boot-time options for framebuffers.

Try going into the system's bios and changing the video memory from 1mb (which the i845 reports by default) to 8mb. If you can't make that change then you'll need to get a bios update and apply it. I had similar problems with low end store servers at work. What happens is when an application (like the splash screen display) queries the graphics card it reports that it only has 1 mb of memory availible to it. This is a known issue with i845 and i865 graphics cards and is patched with an old bios patch on most systems per intel. Anyway if the application requires more than 1 mb it chokes or limits the display resolution. In my case the splash screens just didn't display and the dm was stuck in 640x480 mode using gnome which was a bit of a pain to say the least. Changed the bios setting and poof we were on the road running the resolutions that we needed for our app.

M. Lacy
Western Tool Supply.