[ltp] TP240 - Video problem (?) with SUSE 7.1

[Ted Wiseman]

Any help anyone can give me with this problem would be greatly appreciated, 
as my support period with SUSE has just expired.

After previously working fine, my TP 240 with SUSE 7.1 installed now hangs 
at the GUI login screen. I get all green OK's during the boot, but when 
arriving at the SUSE graphical login screen  the window that normally shows 
icons for the users, asks for username and password, and allows selecting 
KDE, Gnome, etc, now does not fully display. The only thing visible 
(besides the light blue background and SUSE logo) is the outline of the 
window, the GUI system scroll list, and the buttons for GO and 
SHUTDOWN..  Although the trackpoint cursor is movable, none of the buttons 
or the scroll list can be selected. Nor can I execute Ctrl -Alt-F2 to 
switch to a text-based mode. Nothing can be done except power off 
manually,. After that, I am able to do a manual boot and enter init 3 to 
get into a non GUI mode, but that's the only way at present I can run Linux.

SUSE's main response to this, after viewing some hardware info files I 
forwarded to them, was that there was a conflict with the video controller, 
and that I should set the BIOS for a non PNP system. However there is no 
PNP option that I can find in the BIOS setup to do that. Also that 
overlooks the fact that the graphic system was working fine when SUSE 7.1 
was originally installed.

Since this problem arose a while after I got the unit back from IBM repair, 
which replaced the 240's system board, SUSE also suggested that some prior 
settings were affected by the new system board and that I should reinstall 
Linux. I now have done a clean reinstall, choosing the option to overwrite 
the existing installation, but to no avail. The problem remains as before.

Any ideas?


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