Clean Install of 13.1 (and now reinstall of 12.3) Beset With Issues

English Applications
1

Greetings

I’ve been using openSUSE for a number of releases now without real problems. It’s a great OS, and I’m really not tempted to try elsewhere. But my installation of 13.1 has given rise to a cataloge of issues. Some seem related to one application or another (counting KDE, YAST2, Firefox), although others are not. Yet the issue isn’t really one of installation, or of particular hardware, etc. This seemed the most appropriate forum heading, but apologies in advance if it actually isn’t.

I’ve installed a nearly vanilla 13.1 KDE from the DVD. I’ve removed a few packages I don’t use or don’t like - games, Apper and Amarok - and installed (from the SUSE and Packman repositories only) a few others I do - Scribus, Sea Monkey, Audacity, pdftk, Celestia, Requonk, VLC - nothing controversial. The installation sits alone on an HP G60 laptop, with AMD64 processor and nVidia graphics card. I’ve installed the nVidia drivers having first added myself to the video group. I’m using EXT4, with /, home and swap. In fact, absolutely nothing I’ve not done successfully for several releases already on this and another laptop, and on my wife’s.

I at first assumed that the issues I was having (description coming up) were down to 13.1, so in a mood of great disappointment I decided to go back to 12.3, which had worked beautifully. But the issues have followed me to 12.3 ! These are:
(a) I have KDE in folder view with my own wallpaper, but once at boot I was taken to the SUSE splash screen instead, having quite lost all reference to my wallpaper; and on another to my wallpaper but with no folders in view, and no panel (I just have the one panel, at the bottom of the screen).
(b) Installed packages are not always shown in YAST2 as having been installed, yet I know perfectly well that they are installed. A reboot corrects this till the next time.
(c) When scrolling a web page (Firefox or SeaMonkey) using the mouse wheel, it is only a matter of time before the whole display starts to jitter and jump. I suppose it thinks it’s refreshing, but it does so at the rate of a strobe - 10 or 12 times per second at a guess. There is no way out of this. The keyboard is locked. The only exit is the power off switch. The system boots up again normally, but it’s only a matter of time before… (I installed Requonk yesterday, and it hasn’t done it on that - yet).
(d) occasionally when I select a web search result, and click on it to be taken to the web page, instead I am taken - instantaneously - to a completely blank, white screen (not within Firefox, but a white screen within openSUSE).
(e) my USB mouse dies from time to time, and the touchpad remains unfunctioning. This behaviour changed yesterday, when I began to receive messages from the kernel, kindly advising me that it was closing the USB port to which my mouse was connected. After the message, the mouse died but the touchpad became functional. (No power management tools installed.)
(f) yesterday, LibreOffice failed to open at all. Rebooting didn’t help.

I’m not posting in the hope of receiving solutions to any of these individual issues, but I would be interested to hear from a fellow openSUSE user who has experienced something similar. I can’t help but feel there must be one underlying condition which is giving rise to all of them, and perhaps inevitably, I wonder whether it is hardware related. Perhaps my hard drive is preparing for mortality? Or could it be file system corruption? I haven’t had time, but at the weekend I will force a filesystem check at next boot, to see if anything interesting comes up.

The laptop is almost five years old now, so a dying disk would not come as a surprise, but I don’t want to write it off on just an assumption. There certainly is a hardware issue insofar as the laptop is liable to overheat when it is given some work to do - like install an operating system. I have to stand it up on books to increase the airflow to prevent it switching itself off near the end of the install, or during the so called ‘updates’ (seems like a reinstall lol!) afterwards.

Thanks for reading.

GRAHAM

2

I don’t experience any of those issues you describe (and never have).

Since you mention the nvidia driver, there is a problem with version 331.20 that can cause interesting behaviour with many different applications.
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=858421

So if you’re using that you should upgrade to the latest version 331.48.
If you want to use the RPMs, you will have to still wait a bit. As you can see in that bugreport, the packages have been created already but it may be a few days until they are available in the repo.

3

How did you get back to 12.3 - by what method?

I haven’t suffered any of your issues before either.

4

Thanks wolfi323 and consused for your replies.

I’d not picked up on the nVidia bug report, so that could well be the reason for the Firefox issues. I’ll hang on a few days for the new package and upgrade. Thanks for bringing this to my attention.

I keep the install DVDs for a time, so it was a simple matter to go back to 12.3 and do a clean install.

GRAHAM

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The new packages (331.38) are already in the repo now.

6

I originally updated from 12.3 to 13.1 via zypper dup and was experiencing similar problems as the OP. I then did a clean install of 13.1, but the problems persisted. Firefox, evolution, k3b, vlc were all crashing. I was about to go back to 12.3, but having seen this thread I’ll wait until the new Nvidia drivers come on-stream.

Thanks for the information.

7

Thanks very much for letting me know, wolfi3232. I’ve been out all day, so just catching up on things now. I’ll get the new drivers installed and see if things improve.

GRAHAM

8

Sorry to hear you’re having issues too, but thanks for posting, because I’m glad to know it’s not just me !

GRAHAM

9

Installed the new nVidia drivers, and rebooted to get them working, and KDE immediately crashed. I suspect nothing more than coincidence there. Another boot showed that the new drivers seem to have cured the Firefox-related issues, but the others all remain. My USB wireless mouse was turned off within half an hour, so I rebooted again. About an hour later, mouse, keyboard and touchpad all died. At that point the lamp on the front of the laptop indicating hard drive activity showed none. Everything was locked. I’m very suspicious of the hard drive now, but it’s hard to know of course.

I feel another clean install coming on as soon as I get the time.

GRAHAM

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I installed the new Nvidia drivers but that only made Firefox more stable. I’m still getting crashes in evolution, k3b, vlc and audacity (at least). I’ve been using openSUSE since version 8.3, always upgrading when a new version appeared, and have up until now never had such major problems. Maybe it’s unlucky 13 …

Tomorrow (if I have time) I shall be re-installing 12.3. Maybe I’ll try version 13 again when 13.2 comes along …

11

Sorry it’s been a while following up on this. I’ve learnt that the graphics-related issues probably stem from the nVidia card. I thought the processor had overheated a couple of times, causing a hard shutdown, but actually it seems likely to have been the nVidia card. It appears that there has been a long standing issue with some nVidia cards when installed in some HP laptops, including mine. Anyone interested might like to take a look at this forum:
http://www.nvidiadefect.com/hp-laptop-overheating-issues-t1376.html

I’m told that a change isn’t possible as the card is integral to the motherboard, so the machine is dead, but as it’s over five years old, now… Perhaps I’m lucky it’s lasted this long !

GRAHAM