Friday, August 31, 2012

openSUSE 10.1

We have a somewhat ancient SUSE linux machine at hour office.

Today, one of our undergrads. was trying different monitors to see which one he liked the best on this machine. He was simply pluging-unpluging one after another. Then, at the third monitor, the screen blacked out. After rebooting the computer manually by pressing the power button, the computer complained about the display not found and the GUI didn't come on.

It said "fatal server error no screen found"

It turned out that xserver setting got messed up somehow. What I ended up doing was to modify one line in "device" section in xorg.conf. I changed in the "driver" line "fglrx" to "ati" and it worked. After that, I went online and found the following website:

http://forums.opensuse.org/information-new-users/advanced-how-faq-read-only/438705-opensuse-graphic-card-practical-theory-guide-users.html

There, it says "fglrx - this is the proprietary free (as in free beer) ATI driver for the latest ATI hardware." and also says "ati - this is the free open source "ati" driver for very old ATI hardware." 

Our computer is pretty old, built back in 2005 (could be older). Perhaps, the driver "fglrx" was not compatible with the video card. 

Hope this will help someone out there, who isn't very knowledgeable about linux like me.

-unkokusei

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