XFree Problems with SuSE 8.2, GeForce, DVI and 1GB ram. No SuSE support help...

From: Matt (fago_at_earthlink.net)
Date: 09/15/03 

Date: 15 Sep 2003 07:42:01 -0700

I've looked at SuSE's help documents to no avail. SuSE's installation
support seems to be worthless ("only covers monitors correctly
detected by sax"), so hopefully someone here has a suggestion.

The problem:

I am installing SuSE 8.2 on an Athlon XP 2400 with 1GB ram and a
GeForce 4200, connected via DVI to a Sharp LL-T1620 LCD monitor with a
native resolution of 1280x1024@60.

SuSE installs fine (with graphics even), but will not start X. No
matter what I do, with the built-in "nv" drivers, I get a "Frequency
out of Range" error from my monitor. I've tried:

1) boot with vga=normal
2) start sax2 with O=nv 0:1280x1024@60
3) explicitly entered in the Modeline into XF86Config given by xmode
for 1280x1024@60:
Modeline "1280x1024" 102.24 1280 1296 1552 1726 1024 1024 1033 1070

Nothing did any good. Same "frequency out of range" error.

I borrowed a non-DVI LCD monitor (different brand too) from someone
and everything worked fine without doing anything.

I then installed the NVidia drivers. Unfortunately, these require the
framebuffer. The only way I could get these drivers to work was to
boot with the parameters:

mem=768 vga=0x031a [I removed splash=silent and showopts]

This does not allow me to use all 1GB of my memory. Increasing mem
above 768 results in no monitor output at all.

I've had quite a lot of trouble with this issue every time I
upgrade/install SuSE on this computer. Prior to 8.2 I was able to get
things working.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Matt