ATI black screen - does vendor have a clue?

[Rich Braun]

Before tossing yet another new $100 motherboard on the scrap heap, I thought
I'd post here to see if anyone has seen this.  One of the boards on sale at
Microcenter (I notice it's now clearance-priced so I'm betting they've had a
lot of problems...) is the Gigabyte MA78GM-S2H which I was hoping to use as a
low-power MythTV frontend.

After giving up on all the Myth-centric O/S distros, I decided to see if I
could set this board up as a standard Linux desktop.

Even that fails.  It's completely reproducible:  download openSUSE 11.1.  Run
through stock install.  Go to the AMD website and download their device
driver, version 8.12 from 10-Dec-08, use PC for a while with your nice new
driver.  Feel momentarily delighted.

At next reboot, you get black screen.  Never again will you see an image
(unless you go get rid of fglrx device driver and revert back to radeonhd,
which can't play 1080p video).

The vendor helpfully provides public searchable access to their Bugzilla
system.  There are 25 bugs reporting the same basic problelm:  black screen
with fglrx driver.  Does this vendor have any clue at all?

More to the point:  my reason for posting here.  I'd either like a solution to
tweak the xorg.conf file settings to work around this bug, or I'd like to
organize a boycott by the Linux user community of motherboards that contain
ATI graphics chips.

-rich