I’ve got a weird problem with my Open Suse 11.1 (Kernel 2.6.27) installation. Everything used to work perfectly, but for some time now I’ve had the following problem which I’ve been unable to solve yet:
When a user tries to login, the system accepts the password and displays ‘Have a lot of fun…’. So far, so good. However the users don’t get to the shell, but immediately find themselves in some yast basic menu without any options to choose from. Hitting the enter button (which is the only option) logs the user out again. The only thing that works is logging in as ‘root’, which I generally tend to avoid.
I already checked /etc/passwd but couldnt find anything there, the users are set to /bin/bash, just as root.
Since I’ve got no idea how to fix the problem, I do hope that you can help me.
A silly question - how much hard disk memory do you have free?
My wife ran into something similiar a while back when she simply never emptied the trash on her Linux, and eventually her user account filed the hard drive.
Don’t get confused that it’s in German - as you can see it’s some kind of basic menu with no options to choose from. And yeah, I’m running OpenSuse 11.1 in VmWare Server 1.05 on a Windows 2003 Server system.
I’ve just created a new user account and when I logged in I had the SAME problem. I’m confused.
ajoram adjusted his/her AFDB on Monday 10 Aug 2009 16:46 to write:
>
> There’re are still 16GB available. so I don’t think this is the cause of
> the problem.
>
> I uploaded a screenshot of the (empty) menu I get to after login in as
> ‘schof’ to our website:
>
> http://schof-gmbh.de/opensuse.jpg
>
> Don’t get confused that it’s in German - as you can see it’s some kind
> of basic menu with no options to choose from. And yeah, I’m running
> OpenSuse 11.1 in VmWare Server 1.05 on a Windows 2003 Server system.
>
> Cheers,
> ajoram
>
>
And for us ignorant people, what does it say?
–
Mark
Caveat emptor
Nullus in verba
Nil illegitimi carborundum
first: you didn’t mention that the openSUSE is running in a VM under
Windows…i know that is possible, but why would anyone do that, ever?
second: in your first posting you call what i see in the jpg “some
yast basic menu”…but, i have to say in all my years i’ve never ever
seen a menu offered by YaST (or Linux) which looked like this one…
SO, i have to ask you have YOU ever seen a menu like this that HAD
numbers available to pick from?? I ask because whatever (probably
added) program that is throwing up this menu has some sort of fault…
maybe the answer to my first question (WHY run Linux inside of M$?) is
this is a course in Linux command line/shell…
AND, maybe the course has a menu driven navigation and the student
may pick from a range of topics…
what i’m getting at is: i think your problem is neither an openSUSE or
a Linux problem, but a faulty menu program…
–
goldie
Note: Accuracy, completeness, legality, or usefulness of this posting
may be illusive.
ajoram adjusted his/her AFDB on Tuesday 11 Aug 2009 01:06 to write:
>
> Oh, it just says ‘Basic Menu’ in the headline and ‘User:Schof’.
>
> In the bottom line it says ‘Pick one of the key numbers from above or
> press <ENTER> to exit’. Without any key numbers available, all I can do
> is exit.
>
>
As goldie said that is not a SuSE or any linux menu I have ever seen.
If it was some well hidden YaST stuff it would more than likely be in blue
and white which is the colour of the ncurses interface unless this has been
modified by user.
I take the user is logging in by terminal and not a GUI?
What happens if you create a new user?
If the new user is getting the same menu then something system wide has been
changed to the login section.
I cannot even guess what/where this might be coming from.
Can you supply some more info on what exactly this machine is being used for
and the login details please?
(obviously you will mung any sensitive stuff we do not want that )
HTH
–
Mark
Caveat emptor
Nullus in verba
Nil illegitimi carborundum
The reason for running OpenSuse in a VMWare Server is that we are a small company and use an application which requires a MS SQL Server and another application that requires a Linux system. Since our server isn’t really busy there’s just no point in spending money for a second server to run Linux on.
Since the software running on the Linux system is maintained and updated by the developer, a smbserver is running and I set up a VPN Gateway.
As for the menu - No, I’ve never seen it before and have no idea what it is for. Calling it a Yast menu was just a guess.
Creating a new user doesn’t help. I’ve tried that before and when logging in I only get to this weird menu again. The only thing that works is logging in as root.
When logging in by GUI the username and password are visibly accepted, but nothing further happens and eventually I’m returned to the GUI login screen - yet without seeing that strange menu.
As I’m not a Linux Guru myself allow me to ask if there is some configuration file for the login section or which logs I should probably check.
Like the others told you, this is not some openSUSE menu. So the answer to the question about disk space makes no sense either. The free space on the physical disk can be 16 GB, this does not mean the virtual disk that openSUSE runs from is not full…
Try running the VM in runlevel 3 ( on options line in GRUB menu, simply type ‘init 3’. At the login prompt, login as the normal tuser and do a ‘df -h’ to see if the VM is running out of space, and therefor throws you back to some basic VM boot menu. Since it’s only option is not available due to errors it would leave the menu empty. But that’s merely a guess.
This is the best I can do for you, my choice too would have been the other way around ( run Windoos in a VM on a linux host )
i ask because there are hundreds of variations of “openSUSE 11.1” disk
iso images floating around the net…many of which most of us here
may have never seen…perhaps you got one with a non-GRUB bootloader…
[anyway, i’ve never tried installing Linux into a VM under Windows, so
i’m kinda lost here…hmmm, i don’t have an Windows to even try on…]
–
goldie
Give a hacker a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach man and you feed him for a lifetime.
I have eventually managed to solve the issue. A software installed on the system overwrote the profile.local and would only allow users listed in another config-file to login, for all other users it would bring up the basic menu. Adding the users to the configuration file of the software fixed the problem.
Should you ever have similar problems taking a look at /etc/profile and /etc/profile.local might help.
