November 16th, 2004

Widescreen SUSE

I recently reformatted a 250GB drive with SUSE Linux Professional 9.2. I tried the 9.1 version out, and was very impressed with it. Everything I had struggled to mount or use under Fedora Core 2 was automatically probed and configured - with two exceptions. First - and foremost - was my monitor. It's a Sony SDM-V72w (widescreen). I have it connected to an ATI Radeon 9000 card. When I installed SUSE, it was picked up at 1024x768 - not the actual resolution of 1280x768. I tried running YAST to reconfigure it, but it never quite came out right. After about 50 tries, I finally got it right. One of the problems I had is that, under Fedora, I used a set of drivers from ATI. The SUSE 9.2 has moved to the Xorg server, and those drivers haven't been updated yet - they won't run. According to some of the chatter I heard, "maybe in November" they'll be updated. I had been trying to use a Modeline Generator to create entries for my xorg.conf file. Apparently, I was doing something wrong, because every time I tried to switch to the wider resolution, my screen would black out, and the hardware would display a message: "Resolution not supported - switch to 1280x768 @ 60hZ". On the ocassions that I was able to view at full-width, it looked like there were a few extra pixels, and the fonts were a bit smushed and fuzzy. I wish I knew exactly what I was doing wrong, but I don't. Eventually, things fell into place. I even toyed around with the xcomposite extensions - live dropshadows and translucency. Neat stuff, but slowed down the system a tad, and was actually a bit distracting. Next up, trying to get SUSE to handle my Hauppauge TV Card. It's being recognized, but when I try to scan channels, I get nothing. I've tried removing the card and reinstalling it, but I get to a point where YAST asks me to point to the firmware file ("sc_main.mc") - which has to be pulled out of the Windows system. Urgh...

Posted November 16, 2004 in personal.   There are 2 comments.