Installing SuSE Linux 7.2 on an IBM ThinkCenter (3): XFree86

So, after replacing Lilo with Grub legacy, I now had a booting SuSE Linux 7.2 Professional, just not a pretty one. I remember Marcel Gagné writing, in Linux System Administration, that he spent most of his time in text environments and would only start X when he actually needed it. I am not of his generation.

SuSE’s X configuration tool, SaX, had failed me during the installation procedure, but SaX2 was also available, and that responded a lot more promising on an installed system. The first screen proposed default VGA and asked me if I liked that.

I did not like it

As you can see, I finally sorted out how to do VGA upscaling using the ODV GBS-C I also use for my SCART connections while simultaneously feeding the signal to my monitor, so now I can make proper screenshots using OBS video capture. These are image heavy posts though, so I do try to balance size and readability. If it doesn’t work, let me know.

VGA obviously was not what I had in mind, so I chose to change that in the menu. In the next screens I noticed that SaX2 used a bit more screen to the right than was available. No matter, though. First I had to configure my mouse but since it worked fine, I skipped that. The second screen had me select my Keyboard settings.

Select your keyboard

I was pleasantly surprised to see that my new PS/2 keyboard type was among the choices. Then again, when SuSE 7.2 was published, my Dell keyboard was already eleven years old, which was a long time then. Why the Czech Keyboard was the default, I’m unsure.

Then came the important bits, the graphics. SaX2 did not recognise the ThinkCenter’s Extreme Graphics 2, but the i810 chip was among those listed. I knew it had 8 MB because that was what I had given it in the BIOS menu. I also knew the frequencies of the monitor. Like SaX, SaX2 had a test button. Clicking it showed only a black screen for a second and then the start of an XFree86 log, back in the SaX2 window. Scrolling down (not with the mouse wheel but by clicking blind, right of the drawn screen), I saw this line:

1. (--) PCI:*(0:2:0) Intel unknown chipset (0x2572) rev 2, Mem @ 0xf0000000/27 0xe8000000/19, I/O @ 0x1800/3

and at the end:

1. (EE) No device detected

I must have experienced that message often, because it feels like it still has a special place in my brain. So I went back and selected VESA as graphics driver and configured 640×480 pixels with 16-bit colour depth. Now the test button showed a stable screen with arrows to position it. After saving the configuration, I typed startx at the prompt and found myself, after a warning that I started KDE as root, at a low resolution but very colourful KDE 2 desktop.

Feeling victorious already, I added the 800×600 and 1024×768 resolutions. Testing them went fine. Using the table on page 135 of the Reference Manual, I also tried 1280x1024 pixels and 24 bit colours, but those didn’t create a stable XFree86 4. I saved the configuration, left SaX2 and opened a second tty to log in as diederick (tried three times before realising my login name was diederic) and typed startx again.

Currently in the internet

Glorious 1024×768 at 65,536 colours. What more would you need. Whether it was SuSE Linux 7.0 or 7.2, this must be what you saw, some 25 years ago, when you first logged into a newly installed Linux machine, after having finally and conclusively said goodbye to Windows 98/ME for good. The question now is, what is there to do?

Decorating my IBM ThinkCenter with SuSE Linux 7.2 stickers