[ALUG] Suse 10.1 has installed but ....

[Wayne Stallwood]

On Mon, 2006-10-02 at 20:00 +0100, cl at isbd.net wrote:
> If I boot in Suse's "safe mode" the normal login: prompt appears and,
> in addition, I can log in and run startx to get X windows up.
> 
> So, it's all working pretty well really except for the default console
> mode. Does anyone have any ideas how to remedy that? 

I am unsure what the Suse safe mode boot does, but it's a pretty safe
bet that the standard Suse boot enables the framebuffer console and the
safe one doesn't (amongst other things).

I wouldn't mind betting that's where your problem is. Either your
graphics chipset doesn't like vesa framebuffer modes, the kernel doesn't
have the correct framebuffer modules or the default resolution of the
framebuffer is putting your monitor out of signal range (although
normally the monitor tells you this) 

So a quick fix would be to add a vga=normal to the /boot/grub/menu.lst
file for the default boot line.

It might also be worth taking out any options for quiet and splash if
they are present (I suspect they are)

If that works then a better fix would be to find out why the framebuffer
mode doesn't work on your hardware, that way you get the pretty boot
screens back.

As always when modifying a bootloader configuration file, take special
care. I have never seen a Suse installer created menu.lst file so I
cannot tell you exactly where to put these options. If you get it very
wrong then you may not be able to boot the system again without a
recovery disk.