Hello guys!
I have the Acer Aspire 1694 Notebook with the ATI Radeon X700 with 256 MB. I have installed SuSe 10 on it becaus i need it for school but when i want to boot with linux there is only "blackscreen" and i have to type CTRL+ALT+F1 to get a shell, but i can´t start the graphic.
I have read the report of installing Gentoo on a Acer Aspire 1694 on this site but i even can´t solve this problem with SuSe 10 on my Notebook.
THX for help!

bueno
(from Vienna...sorry for my bad english)

Suse probably has x/k/gdm loading at boot so tries to start X up right away, and fails. It is probably leaving you on virtual console 7, hence the black screen. It is most likely a problem with the ati card. You need to look at the output of X when it starts up. The log file is usually located in /var/log/Xorg.0.log.

Paste the contents of the file here and we will have a look.

Ryan

I have just finished installing SUSE 10 on my Acer aspire 1694, and while I don't have everything working yet (my wireless still won't work). I have gotten the xserver to start fine.

First off, boot up into console mode so you don't get the graphical login automatically.

Run sax2 for configuring your Xserver.

Change your monitor to vendor "LCD" and model "1280x800 @ 75Hz"

Change your video card settings to the right video card (this was detected fine for me), go to the options part and set "MonitorLayout" to "LVDS, TMDS".

Test it, then save and re-start into your graphical interface (or just init 5). This should work fine.

I have also started a wiki page at:

http://wiki.linuxhelp.net/index.php/Aspire_1694

So, if you come up with any solutions to other common problems, please post to the discussion page on that and I will add it in.

Hi guys. I am having the same problem as the first guy-I installed suse 10, but upon rebooting and loading, i get the startup tune, but a blank screen? Could you please tell me how to get it working? I too need it for uni. I have no idea what to type into the console (where do I run it from?) Could you please post exactly what I need to type in? Thanks. Please reply asap if poss!

I'm sitting on my Acer Aspire 1694WLMi with a dualboot Windows XP / Suse 10 and everything works fine in linux, except the battery indicator. Which I'm working on fixing.

To get rid of the blackscreen:
Read everything before you do anything...
First you need to get a shell. You can get this by pressing Ctrl + Alt + F1.
You can open more shells by replacing F1 with F2 up to F6. F7 is the gui "shell".

Login as root. Type fglrxconfig. This program configure you xorg.conf file so if you don't know what your doing, you should take a backup of your xorg.conf file by typing cp xorg.conf xorg.conf.backup (for example). Now your backup is in the xorg.conf.backup. So if you mess it up you just copy it back.

When you have setup your xorg.conf file correctly, I did it while I was drunk so it can't be that hard. Don't remember much thou. Anywhay, startX is the command that starts X (gui "shell"). If X is running type: "pkill -9 X" which kills all X prosesses. Then type startX, if you don't get up a GUI you failed in the configuration. Try again. If you get a login screen you succeded. I would recommend you to download the linux drivers to your graphicscard from ati.com. This part is well documented on the ati.com page, so you should be able... I'm out of here...

Good luck

--
Halvor

By the way. The path to the xorg.conf file is /etc/X11/xorg.conf

--
Halvor

Now I have, with help from Eric Piel, managed to fix the batterycontrol as well.
Pages like:
http://acpi.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/SuseHowToLoadCustomDsdtTable
http://www.lirmm.fr/~yousfi/divers/acer/
and
http://gaugusch.at/kernel.shtml
have been a great help. The first page was the one I read last, but gave me a breakthrou. If you need help, post, and I'll check this page once in a while.

--
Halvor