Recently I'd finally managed, with helpful suggestions from some list
readers here, to install SL 4.2 on my system.  A main source of diffi-
culty had been that system-config-display was messing up the display and
video adapter information and insisting on writing that mis-information
to xorg.conf.  After that was finally cleared up by modifying xorg.conf
manually, a remaining problem was the lower quarter of the screen seemed
to lose its sync (not always the whole width of the screen, often just
the part of a window there).

The problem wasn't the requested resolution, 1280x960 by 16 bits, since
a higher resolution, 1600x1200 by 16 bits, worked fine.  I suspected the
video driver.

Since my OS/2 system worked well with the desired resolution using the
SNAP driver that came with eCS, I decided to try out the linux version
of SNAP to see if that solved the problem.  It installed painlessly, and
would no doubt have immediately fixed the screen if system-config-display
didn't again barge in and screw up xorg.conf by up-dating the correct
version written by SNAP.  After fixing this by reverting to the SNAP ver-
sion of xorg.conf, the screen has behaved as it is supposed to.

On the way to this fix, after SNAP was installed and I was re-booting,
Kudzu showed up to probe for new hardware.  Then an information screen
came up, after which a second screen informed me that it was removing the
Permedia2 video adapter, which is what my system has.  There were three
option boxes: Remove Configuration, Keep Configuration, and Do Nothing
(this is from memory and the wording may be off).  After just 3 or 4 se-
conds, before I could read all the info in that window and decide what
I should do, and without pressing Enter, the screen went black and was
replaced by a mottled one that claimed, in big letters, INVALID SCAN FRE-
QUENCY.  This happened at each of several re-bootings, until I finally
read enough of that window to be prepared to make a quick choice to Keep
Configuration.  After that the system booted to 640x480 or 800x600 (not
sure which), and I could replace the incorrect xorg.conf with the one
prerpared by SNAP.  A further reboot finally produced the fixed 1280x960
resolution.

My impression is that the display/driver parts of the SL 4.2 system have
some serious deficiencies that should be addressed.  Is this something
that RedHat was responsible for, or have they been modified by the SL
group?

- Dushan Mitrovich