TVOut on a Compaq Armada 1750 ATI 3D Rage LT Pro under Linux

I have a Compaq Armada 1750 laptop with an ATI 3D Rage LT Pro video card. I rune SuSE 10.0 on it, keeping it light with some custom configuration and blackbox for a window manager. Recently I really wanted to get the TV out working on it, so I can hook it up to the TV in the living room.

As a note, SuSE 10.0 on my laptop was running Xorg 6.8.2.

I searched and searched through lots of recipes for gettng atitvout to work. It turned out easier than can be. Here are the steps I used:

1. Download and install atitvout-0.4-194.i586.rpm.
2. Reconfigure xorg.conf to use the vesa driver. You cannot use the ati or other drivers. Also, I recommend making sure you can support 1024x768 and 800x600 in your configuration.
3. Reboot with the vesa driver and configuration in place.
4. As root,
   atitvout ntsc
   atitvout -f lt

It should be noted that this ONLY WORKS if you booted the machine with the TVout cable hooked up to something.