Black screen after first reboot during installation, and every reboot thereafter

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hi,

I’ve installed OpenSUSE from a USB stick onto a Thecus W4000 machine which has a quad core Intel Atom, 2GB RAM, a 120GB SSD with 3 x 1TB SATA drives, and 2 x 1GB Ethernet, both connected. I followed the guided install, allowing the installer to partition the disks however it chose. I chose the Server install option.
All went well, until it needed to reboot. Then after it had rebooted, the screen went black, no display, and so I couldn’t do anything with it.

Now looking at the DHCP server, it doesn’t appear to have picked up an IP address. When I switch it off and back on, I see the green OpenSUSE menu, (USB stick removed) and when it starts to boot to Leap 15, the screen goes black again.

All advice gratefully received,
Steve

2

When exactly is “after reboot”? Immediately after POSTing? After making a selection at the Grub menu? Later still? What’s the last thing you see before black?

I might not be much help, because I know there are some limitations on Atom I’m not familiar with. And, I have no experience with “cloud” or iSCSI devices. Until someone comes along with better info, here’s what I would first try if you get as far as the Grub menu:

1-at the boot menu after POSTing, strike the e key, navigate to the line that starts with linux or linuxefi (it may be wrapped), and append

3 plymouth.enable=0

to it
2-proceed to boot. I hope instead of fancy graphics or just plain black you’ll get a bunch of boot messages and then a command prompt. If you do, then
3-login as root
4-

zypper rm xf86-video-intel

5-try a normal boot

If the process is no help, instead or in addition, append

nomodeset

as instructed in the above 1-5.

3

Hi,

I tried those suggestions, appending the code to the linuxefi line. Unfortunately it made no difference, either one or the other, or a combination.

I video recorded the boot process, so I could see exactly what was flashing upon the screen.

The grub menu appears, then I see the following:

“Booting ‘openSUSE Leap 15.0’”
But if I edited the command, it says:
“Booting a command list”
The next 2 lines read
“Loading Linux 4.12.14-1p150.11-default …”
“Loading initial ramdisk …”
Then the screen clears, I see a flashing cursor at top left for a second, then this text appears for a fraction of a second:
" 4.211122] gma500 0000:00:02.0: GPU: power management timed out."
The number inside the square brackets appears to be random. I have also seen:
" 4.350986] gma500 0000:00:02.0: GPU: power management timed out."
and
" 4.215141] gma500 0000:00:02.0: GPU: power management timed out."
and
" 4.140580] gma500 0000:00:02.0: GPU: power management timed out."

Then the screen goes black, the monitor flags up that there’s no signal, and that’s that.
I’ve had a look in the BIOS, I can’t see any settings relating to video apart from one which would allow me to choose a dedicated video card if there was one (there isn’t, and I don’t think there’s space to fit one).

Thanks for your help,
Steve

4

Ok so I did a little bit of googling and found this problem is fairly common. E.g.:
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2250571
I blacklisted the driver in grub and now I have logged in as root. :slight_smile:
Now to continue setting it up, I hope!

5

Never log into a GUI as root!!!

All setup can be done as regular user supplying root password as needed.

6

Hi,

Yes, I am aware of the need to log on as an ordinary user. I was logging onto the prompt that appeared after I disabled the graphics driver. It wasn’t a GUI. I think I need to reinstall now anyway, in order to complete the installation process. To be honest I didn’t know what to expect, I’ve never set up an openSUSE server before. I wasn’t expecting a GUI, doesn’t it run headless usually? I’ll have to check the docs now.

Thanks,
Steve

7

Also my view: “User Interface: Server” should mean “Text Mode” – no GUI …

  • I’ll install to a VM from the boxed openSUSE DVD and report back on this issue.
  • I suspect that, we’ll also have to address this issue when Beta-Testing Leap 15.1 …
8

@steveblakemore:

I’ve installed openSUSE Leap 15.0 from the boxed DVD into an Oracle VirtualBox VM – UEFI; ext4 system partition; XFS home partition; enough swap for system hibernation; “Server” (Text Mode).

  • It boots to Text mode.
  • The systemd default Target is “multi-user.target”.
  • There isn’t any GUI installed, anywhere …

Did you, during installation:

  • Check that, the online Repositories where correctly configured and, available?
  • Check that, only the basic system, enhanced base system, AppArmour, YaST and Software Management patterns were installed?
9

Hi dcurtisfra,

Sorry for the delay in replying.
I also did a virtual install, and it worked fine. There was nothing wrong with the download, or the choices I made during installation. It was all to do with the graphics driver gma500. Blacklisting that solved the issue, and text mode worked fine then, installing to my hardware. There is a very basic display on this machine. As mrmazda said, it might be a limitation of the Atom processor.

Thanks to all for your help, :slight_smile:
Steve

10

The Intel PowerVR GMA 500 Linux driver present in the current Leap 15.0 Kernel only supports 2D acceleration - since 2011 …
And, I see that, the box is a NAS server which had Windows Storage Server 2012 running on it, with HDMI and VGA interfaces for media streaming …