Radeon HD 6570 Display Problem

Question

I recently upgraded my graphics card by buying and installing an AMD Radeon HD 6570. My Windows partition works fine, but my OpenSUSE 12.1 Linux partition is having a strange issue.

When I try to boot into SUSE it appears to load fine at first, giving me the green screen with the OpenSUSE name and the chameleon.
However, right around the time the chameleon's eyes would move, the screen switches to what I can only describe as green and black bars. It loads this way for a while then switches to blue and black bars, which I assume is the login screen.

I had been using LXDE before, and it was working fine before I switched GPUs. Is there any way for me to fix this, or should I try a different Linux distro? If the latter, is Lubuntu compatible with my GPU?

Also, I've tried using Ctrl+Alt+F2 (I believe that's the correct combo, haven't been able to use Linux in almost a month) to get to a command line but that won't work either.

Answer 1

I would first see if the issue is with OpenSuSE or the card's driver. Try running off a live CD (I would recommend Ubuntu) and see if you're able to get to the desktop without any troubles. If you can, then I'm assuming the driver is causing some problems on SuSE.

If the SuSE install was fresh, you are probably using the open source ATI graphics driver which has limited functionality. If you've modified SuSE at all in the past, you might be running fglrx, the non-free driver from ATI.

I would try re-installing SuSE just to be sure (there might have been some corruption). Also, I believe 12.1 is a new release, which means your high-end graphics card might not be fully supported yet.