19 October 2007 by Lars

Installing openSUSE 10.3, take 2

Yesterday, I installed (not upgraded) openSUSE 10.3 on my workstation. It is a bit iffy – it’s a cheapo motherboard, with onboard and add-on SATA, and always confuses the OS in terms of what disk comes in what order… Add to that a PCI GigE card that always forgets its MAC address (00:00:00:…), it’s not easy… I installed to the SATA disk, and the installation went really smoothly, until the reboot, when it booted back into the old GRUB install on the IDE drive. OK, figured that one out (modify the device.map, have it chainload the SATA drive from Grub, if the BIOS can’t figure it out).

The real problem was to get the X11 up. I have two 19″ and one wide-22″ screen in a three-screen set up, using a dual-head Matrox G450 and a PCI ATI video card. This always messes up SaX2 (the SUSE tool). I last succeeded integrating the 22″ screen by hand, all automatic tools had failed. But that setup wouldn’t work, either. Xorg was 6.9 on SUSE 10.1, now it was at 7.2. Downloaded the latest Matrox driver, 4.4.0, but that didn’t like something. Found the solution at http://matrox.tuxx-home.at – unofficial Matrox (mga) driver 4.4.3, and a little script, worked just fine. The trouble is that the stock mga driver wouldn’t find Screen 1 (the second head). Once this was solved, everything was fine.

Xgl doesn’t like my triple-head setup, so no fancy 3D desktop for now – bummer. Can’t have everything, I guess…