[ale] Can this desktop be saved??

[John Mills]

ALE X11/Xorg gurus and gurettes -

I've been trying different installations on an old server (2 at 32-bit Xeon, 
9 fans, sounds like a wind tunnel!) and I just stumbled over a setup I 
would like to clone.

The Tyan S2720 motherboard has built-in ATI Rage-XL graphics with 8 MBy 
dedicated SDRAM and out-of-the-box delivers an 800x600 VGA display: not 
good enough for a desktop, but fine for a server, at least in principle 
("Color is for end users!" - anon ALEr).

The display is a reasonable Samsung 932BW LCD of 1400x900 native 
resolution. Not glamorous perhaps, but perfectly usable for me.

When I install an evaluation version of Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise 
Server, I get a nice 1440x900 display!

Hmmm - this would make this dinosaur into a perfectly suitable desktop.

BUT: All other Linux distros I tried (and Solaris X86) seem to only find 
the sub-usable 800x600 configuration. This includes openSUSE-11.3 that I 
just installed.

Question 1: How can I set up the openSUSE X server to deliver the 1440X900 
screen I enjoy with SUSE Enterprise server. Obviously the hardware is 
capable even if it can't use high-speed video RAM.

Question 2:
If I can't convince the openSUSE version of X11 to deliver the WSXGA 
screen, what could I clone from the Enterprise Server to upgrade the 
openSUSE display?

TIA.

  - Mills