[ale] SuSE 7.1/ATI Radeon pain in the ASCII

[Eric Z. Ayers]

Keith Hopkins wrote:
> Steven A. DuChene wrote:
> 
>> On Sun, Oct 21, 2001 at 06:33:44PM +0900, Keith Hopkins wrote:
>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>>   I found a solution to a problem that I've heard no one ask about, 
>>> yet. :-)
>>>
>>>   Installing (or attempting) to install SuSE 7.1 (maybe 7.2 also) and 
>>> calling
>>>   up the YAST1 installer at the boot prompt causes the system to 
>>> completely
>>>   hose shortly after the kernel bootup loads (that's right, I don't 
>>> even have
>>>   the OS loaded on!)
>>>
>>>   The culprit is SuSE's use of the fbdev display in combination with 
>>> a ATI Radeon
>>>   64M DDR (bulk or retain, I tried both).  This was in both a 
>>> Gigabyte GA-7DXR
>>>   and a Asus A7V motherboard.
>>>
>>>   The solution I found is to use boot prompt "vga=normal" as in 
>>> "boot:yast1 vga=normal".
>>>   And magically, everything was right once again in the world.
>>>
>>> Lost in Tokyo,
>>>   Keith
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Keith:
>> Are the motherboards mentioned above have Athlon chips? I have found 
>> quite a bit of
>> info regarding bad interactions between certain Athlon motherboards 
>> and Radeon graphics
>> cards. I experienced systems lockups first hand on a friends system 
>> repeatably with
>> such a combination when trying to bring up the Xserver.
>>
>> Are you actually in Tokyo or is that just an expression in your sig?
>>
> 
> Hi Steve,
> 
>   Yes, both systems are Athlon systems.

I have a Matrox Millenium G200+ and when I stuck it in my brand new 
Athlon board (a low end ECS motherboard), nothing happened. Even 
upgrading the video card bios didn't help, so I had to swap out graphics 
cards.  A TNT2 works fine in it.

-Eric.




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