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computerlarryFlag for United States of America

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No Video On Dell Optiplex OpenSUSE 10.3 - How To Enable?

I have a Dell Optiplex 320, Dual Processor.  I put in two 500GB SATA drives.

I can get the OpenSUSE installer to run if I change the video mode to VESA. The installation goes fine. As soon as it's done, and SUSE is about to start, the screen goes black, I hear some music, and the screen never comes back again.

I can't get an answer on this from suseforums.net, which is a disappointment. I found one article that indicates it might be a video driver problem.

"The third and final point is X.org configuration. The Optiplex 320 ships with two graphic cards (one on the mainboard). X.org autodetection just configures the first card it finds on the bus, which is the onboard chip. So make sure to use the correct one or your monitor will stay black in X. For me it was to change "PCI:1:5:1" to "PCI:2:0:0". Others say you should also use the 'radeon' driver."

I have a guess that there's a settings file somewhere that refers to PCI, but the same notes say:

"The solution is to boot with the pci=nomsi kernel parameter. I used Debian Etch for this, because it doesn't help with SuSE 10.1."    There are no step-by-step instructions that I could find for this procedure.

My instinct is to put in a PCI video card, but the indications are that the SUSE installer may still try and work with the onboard video controller.

I would give up on the Dell Optiplex 320 as just being plain incompatible, but that means I have to try and find a SATA card to put in an older machine, with the possibility that the SATA card will have incompatibilities of its own.

Any help would be appreciated.

Larry0

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Jozk0
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Larry, try to install in "textmode", this works all the time. I think you need to press F3 during install:

http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Black_screen_after_installation_startup

I assume the ati card does not work well with the shipped radeon driver, so once you're up and running I would suggest to download and install the ati driver.

To avoid confusion with the two cards, you might try to disable one of them in BIOS.
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If the install completed, when you boot, do you get the GRUB menu or does it go black right away?

If you have a boot menu, you should be able to boot to runlevel 3 by entering "3" in the GRUB menu.  

If you can, then after logging in as your regular user, SU so you have root privileges and then enter "sax2 -r" (without the quotes.)  This will run the video configurator for X.  Choose the video card/driver and the monitor, test it, and if it works save it. When you get out of sax2, enter "startx" to launch your graphical environment and see how it goes.  If it comes up OK, log out, restart and see if it works.
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ShineOn
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