graphics related problems

[cayalee]

hi all, hope you can help me with a problem i've been having with opensuse and also suse9.3 pro.
the problem comes after the install, the graphics card is detected and runs beautifully in the yast installer, with the install completing fine.
upon reboot it seems to lose the settings as it boots into x, what seems like a horrendous whitewash.
now the hardware i am using it on is an old compaq evo n400c (850mhz proc, 128mb ram, ati rage mobility 32mb, allegro sound card)
the graphics set up works fine on ubuntu 5.10 and 6.06, but i get similar results on newer linuces, eg freespire 1.013, ubuntu7.04, opensuse10.2.
i think this is to do with it using xvesa rather than framebuffering, but alas i have no real idea how to change this back.
so far i have tried ctrl alt f2, login as root and init 3, get into yast2 that way, though the system usually hangs when loading the graphics module, sometimes it progresses to load the whitewash screen.
i'm stuck and would really appreciate help or ideas..

[bryansmith]

Have you retried configuring X with sax from the CLI?

[cayalee]

hmm, i'll give that a try though it didnt work on 10.2

[cayalee]

no joy with that. i boot into safe mode, login as root, open sax2 and configure it right. i press the test button and it all shows up fine. i save it and then when i reboot, i get the god awful whitewash.
whats going on i dont get it?

[cayalee]

ok it seems that a reboot kills the changes you make. after several of these i decided to init 5 after doing the sax2 config and im now in a graphical environ. we'll see if this stays the same after a reboot

[cayalee]

im quite baffled now, i can do the set up from the failsafe option and then init 5 to a graphical environ, but when i reboot into the normal (non:failsafe) grub option i still get the horrible whitewash. has anyone got any ideas?