Q I wonder if you could point me in the right direction to seek appropriate support? I've just bought a new Evesham PC, and wanted to explore whether I could move away from Windows so I ran SUSE 9.2 from your DVD (having initially partitioned my HD and created a Linux partition and swap partition). I followed the guidance for installing the 32-bit version and have now tried to install it perhaps a dozen times. Most times it freezes completely at some point; but even when it went the whole way I got no display (just a blank screen and the X mouse cursor). I think I've narrowed this down to a problem with the monitor - a Viewsonic VX912. A friend advised me to try installing text mode by choosing run level three. This has worked, but isn't very glamorous! Any ideas about how I can resolve this problem or where I'd go for support?
A If the system locks up during install, it is likely to be because of a hardware conflict or a kernel issue with the specification of your system. I'd recommend installing an alternative distro as a test to verify if the problem is specific to SUSE, or impacted by other hardware features, such as SATA, USB2 or expansion cards in your system. The monitor should not cause problems, as all it will do is advertise its model information to the system so the appropriate hsync/vsync values can be configured. The monitor definitely won't make the system lock up or otherwise not install. It may be an issue with your video card, although you didn't say what spec card you have. You may also want to try Knoppix, which will boot directly from CD-ROM and will attempt to automatically detect all of your hardware devices. This should be a good indicator of anything that may have problems with other Linux distributions. Of course, we're assuming that Windows XP ran stably on the same hardware -otherwise you'll want to get in touch with Evesham and find out if there is a hardware problem with your box.