adventures in opensuse 11.2rc1

**reed9** · 10-19-2009

Well, I've never been a particular fan of opensuse, but it's been a while since I've looked at it, and I thought I'd take the release candidate out for a walk. I ran into a few problems.

Hardware
AMD Turion 64 Mobile CPU
1 GB RAM
Radeon XPRESS 200M graphics card
Broadcom BCM4318 Wireless
Realtek RTL8139 Ethernet

The install initially went fine. Opensuse has a very straightforward install process. I particular like the "import existing mountpoints" option during install. Nice touch.

So everything completes, the system reboots, and suse starts it's first boot configuration. I realize it's trying to setup the repos, but the computer isn't currently connected to the internet, so I grab an ethernet cord and plug it in. Things continue to seem fine.

I'm looking at the forums here for a few minutes, and I look up and the screen is black. Keyboard and mouse appear unresponsive and I end up doing a hard reboot.

Now on boot, the login manager fails, and it drops me to the console with these errors

Code:

Failed services in runlevel 5: earlyxdm
linux-faou login: /var/uscreens: Not a regular file
/var/run/SuSEfirewall2: Not a regular file
/var/run/screens: Not a regular file
//: Not a regular file

It hangs there and I have to send an interrupt with CTRL+C to get to a console login.

I try restarting the loging manager

Code:

/etc/init.d/xdm restart

I'm used to the KDE login manager service being called KDM, but that doesn't exist in /etc/init.d/. I don't know if that's normal for suse or not. Anyway, doesn't help.

I try startx and see some permission errors writing to my home directory. I check and my home directory doesn't exist. Well, alright. What the hell, I'll just make it.

Code:

sudo mkdir /home/reed
sudo chown reed /home/reed

Try the login manager and startx again, still no go. Ah, wait, startx needs the ~/.xinitrc file.

Code:

nano ~/.xinitrc

Put in exec startkde, save and close. Startx now gets me into KDE! Alright.

Off to work now. But that's where I am at the moment. There's a lot about opensuse I like, but I can't say this is the first trouble I've had with it. This isn't the final release, so maybe whatever went wrong will be fixed in the final product, but when I tried 11.1 back when it came out, I recall struggling with some weird installation issues as well. I've had some trouble on this machine with other distros as well - mostly around the graphics card, but never anything to this extent.

**reed9** · 10-19-2009

Well, so much for testing opensuse. I decided to do a reinstall and see if I can catch the error. After reboot, during the intitial configuration, it blanked on me again. Same problem. I'm not invested enough to try and figure out if it can be fixed. I've installed beta's, release candidates, and final versions of Fedora, Mandriva, Ubuntu, and others on this hardware without problem, so opensuse fails in my book. Perhaps I'll revisit it in another few releases.

**MikeTbob** · 10-20-2009

Nice little review reed9, thanks for that. I myself had troubles with OpenSuse awhile back and I can't even remember which version it was, maybe 11.1, but I also had troubles with it. They made a really big snafu on Grub,,,which caused me to lose all my OS's upon reboot, of course I figured it all out and restored from backup files but it was not really very fun...anyhow that was the last time I tried OpenSuse. I think I might pass on this version too.

**reed9** · 10-20-2009

It's a shame. Opensuse looks and feels more polished than pretty much any distro I've used -- except that it doesn't actually work for me. There's an awful lot I like about it, though, a lot of small touches that really make the distro, like I mentioned with the importing mount points.

I should note that I was able to replicate the problem by choosing "Configure X Server" in Yast, and it blanked exactly the same. I assume then that it's an issue with the graphics card, which has been ornery in other distros. But then, using startx, everything works fine. So I don't know.

I'm burning Mandriva 2010 rc2 right now. We'll see how that goes. I'm interested to see their moblin implementation.

**reed9** · 10-20-2009

Hmm, well, Mandriva failed on this compater as well. Similar. The install completed seemingly fine and then after reboot, it just goes black. Older version of Mandriva have worked fine on the machine. Maybe some change in the ATI drivers, it seems to be a graphics card issue, but in Arch, the open source ATI driver works fine. Weird. If anyone has an idea, let me know. I'll look around for a solution when I have time.

**reed9** · 10-20-2009

I'm almost certain the problem is with KMS, which is enabled for ATI cards in these new releases. That would explain why the older releases worked and these don't. I haven't had a chance to test it out yet, but will tonight.

**reed9** · 10-20-2009

Alright, back to opensuse. Re-installed, and found on the first reboot after the installation process, moving into the initial configuration, there was no grub screen and I didn't get a chance to try passing nomodeset to the boot line.

So, went through the same thing as before re: creating my home folder, changing ownership to get to the GUI.

Curious about the earlyxdm error, I looked in the /etc/init.d/ and the service scripts. Saw two xdm related entries, one xdm.orig and one xdm. Looking at the files, xdm.orig looked like a normal script, but xdm was empty! Ok, copied xdm.orig to xdm and restarted...black screen.

Rebooting into the failsafe mode drops me to the console. I try sudo /etc/init.d/xdm start and lo! into KDE.

I change the default runlevel in /etc/inittab to 3, restart into the normal mode. Again start xdm manually from the console and it starts fine. So why doesn't it start from runlevel 5??? I guess something to do with whatever earlyxdm is, but I can't find much info on that yet.

**justcallmejim** · 11-17-2009

Did you ever figure this one out? I have the same issues with my laptop which also has a Radeon XPRESS 200M. I didn't have any problems with any of my other systems (all NVidia based graphics).

If I log in and start KDM everything seems to work fine. It just won't do it on boot and fails earlyxdm.

**reed9** · 11-17-2009

No, never figured this one out. I can tell you that Ubuntu 9.10 worked perfectly on the machine, though.

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