The following article contains opinions and personal views of the author and will be taken as such. There is no guarantee to the accuracy, timeliness of some of the information that may be found within the article. The methods that are discussed here might not be applicable in your case. The author will not be held liable for any damage caused by using the method/(s) described in this article . Use the methods at your own risk. - hardwyrd

You’ve decided to give SuSE a try and decided to download the latest builds of OpenSuSE (10.3), SLED10, or SLES10. You then installed your SuSE build, followed its intuitive installation workflow, and see through the second reboot expecting to see the revamped GNOME gui that SuSE is getting known for.

When you least expect it, after the machine rebooted, it presented you with SuSE’s GRUB menu, and proceeded to enter while you’re eager to find the login screen and then —- nothing. No glitzy blue-ish background, no login screen, nada, zip, zero. You rebooted again, and again, and again, and then still nothing. You inserted the install disc into your DVD drive, fired up the Repair tool, rebooted, and still nothing.

You’re face is all flustered up, red as a tomato, all plumped up ready to burst. You feel useless because your newly bought uber-PC with high-end graphics card/accelerator won’t budge.

DECISIONS, DECISIONS! What are you going to do? Should you ditch SuSE now and use another distro perhaps Ubuntu, Fedora, or Mandriva? Or are you going to call your self brave, and duke it out and find a way to defeat this “glitch” ?

So you decided to duke it out…

There are actually a couple of issues that might have contributed to your SuSE install to not display anything. And the most usual suspects will be your graphics card, and your display (LCD, CRT, or otherwise). A lot of graphics cards today are so damn bleeding edge (in terms of resolution, etc..) that various existing displays cannot support the full capabilities that these cards provide. Most standard displays can support 1024 x 768 resolution at 60Hz of display frequency without much problems. However, not all displays can support frequencies higher than 60Hz. Here lies the problem. Most graphics cards, when initialized by Linux (SuSE in our case), will be utilizing the settings in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. To make matters worse, the default mode will be at 24-bit using the maximum resolution that is closer to your display resolution supported. And no, the frequency isn’t being considered. Sax will base on the resolution setting and not the frequency setting. So if you have a display with a maximum res of 1024x768 at 60Hz, Sax2 will use 1024x767 at 75 Hz if 60Hz is not available in the xorg.conf! And no, specifying your own resolution rates most likely won’t work. There are times that you can craft your own xorg.conf file and it will work. Though the ratio of success versus failure will be 1:100. And if you don’t know your way around xorg.conf, you’re better off to leave it alone.

If these configs get bungled, then you won’t find even a speck of pixel on your display — eternal blackness!

But hey, its not the end of the road. Ever notice that you have a perfectly good display when you installed your SuSE build? Uhuh, yes. While we do want to have our display in full 24-bit glory, as of yet, we can’t because 1.) our display might not support higher than 60Hz, or 2.) our graphics card driver is not updated.

So what are we gonna do for the mean time? Use the xorg.conf that the installer used until we get a more capable display, or finish downloading that updated graphics card driver. This is just a first aid solution, and not to be used for the long term. Though this will work perfectly if you are using SLES10. Servers don’t need full resolution graphics you know.

Where the heck is it anyways?
Ok. No need to fret. You can find the default installation-grade xorg.conf at /etc/X11/xorg.conf.install. So how do we go about it? Simple. Before we proceed, we’ll need to shift views and use one of our TTY consoles. Consoles can be opened using CTRL + ALT and any of the function keys from F1 to F6. After going to one of our consoles, login using the root account and do the following:


# cd /etc/X11/
# cp xorg.conf xorg.conf.mine
# cp xorg.conf.install xorg.conf

That’s it!
If you want to test it, DO NOT USE SAX2! If you will invoke sax2 -r, it will overwrite the settings in our xorg.conf file. To test our graphic setting, do the following:

# /etc/init.d/xdm restart
# startx

If you can see the graphical login screen, then congratulations!

However, the work doesn’t stop here. You’ll have to download your updated graphics card driver and install it, remember? But alas my friend, we have to part here for now. That’s another tip for another day.

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