Hi all,
After upgrading from 11.1 to 11.2 X no longer starts upon boot. If I login as root I can simply type “gdm” which kicks off the auto login and Gnome starts up. Everything works fine after that (in fact, things are running much faster and wi-fi, which was previously buggy for me, is no longer any problem at all!)
Anyway, is there something in my configuration that is preventing the window manager from starting automagically?
Thanks
Don’t login as root.
Did you try login as user?
Disable auto login via Yast.
Disable Auto-Login - openSUSE Forums
Can you get to a user login with UI or just CLI?
What happens at CLI if you do startx
If I login as user and try startx I get:
xinit: no such file or directory (errno 2)
no server "/usr/bin/X.x11-video-fglrxG01 in PATH
If I login as root and try startx I get:
/root/.xserverrc: line 51: exec: X: not found
unable to connect to X server
BTW, I have seen a lot of use of the terms UI and CLI but have no idea what they mean…
I’ll try disabling the autologin in YAST. One thing I notice is that after I start the window manager (as root) using “gdm” I do see the autologin screen show up (very briefly) at which point the window manager starts and things run fine…
Thanks for your help!
What graphics device do you have?
You should be able to disable auto login by going to Yast this way:
Boot to Level 3, then Yast and More… - openSUSE Forums
Quickie update…
I disabled auto-login, but still need to execute the manual “gdm” window manager start-up. Now, however, I get the login screen rather than the auto-login.
But, I was trying to figure out how to disable the auto-login next, so that was useful feedback for that purpose anyway… 
thanks
Oh, and graphics is ATI Radeon xpress 200M
I’m using the Radeon driver – was previously using the ATI driver on 11.1, but could not get sax2 to work with fglrx. Perhaps I needed to try fglrxG01? But, anyway, the Radeon driver seems to be working MUCH better as some 3D games that were not working on 11.1 are now working on 11.2… Well, okay, maybe it’s not the driver, but I’m guessing that it is based on some other info gleaned from the forums…
My knowledge on ATI is not good because I have never had ATI. But I can tell you there have been major issues recently with ATI not providing drivers. But you should not and neither should you need to login as root to get a display.
Okay, I made perhaps a little progress…
YAST - edit /etc/sysconfig: changed DISPLAYMANAGER from xorg-fglrxG01 to xorg
It still did not auto-start the display manager, however, I can now login as user and execute startx which starts the default wm (gdm in this case).
So, maybe I’m one step closer?
Oops, one step forward, two steps back…
I went back into /etc/sysconfig and changed the displaymanager to xdm. On the next boot I got a black screen and no response to any input. So, I booted failsafe, changed this back to gdm, but now I still have the same problem, black screen.
I reran sax2, just to make sure that wasn’t the issue, and no change. I can now only boot in “failsafe” mode – all other attempts to boot in the normal mode result in black screen with no response…
help?
I suggest a careful look at this
ATI/Troubleshooting - openSUSE
Thanks. I’ve read through this in the past but this is for using the ATI drivers fglrx. I was actually quite happy now running the open source radeon driver.
If I sax2 -r -m 0=radeon then sax2 runs beautifully and everything looks fine. It is now only during the boot that everything hangs. I’m going to try boot with INIT 3 and see if I can manually start gdm again…
Okay, that worked. If I boot with INIT 3, then I just login as root and do an INIT 5 and the window manager starts up and everything looks perfect… So, it works manually, but barfs when it runs the normal boot procedure.
I’ll try booting again in normal mode, but I expect the black screen again.
Woo-hoo, it’s working…
I don’t know why, but it’s working perfectly now. Window manager starts, goes to login screen, from which I can login…
I have no idea what made it work again.
Okay, just to close this out so it’s not a totally useless thread to anyone else. I believe that my xorg.conf file must’ve gotten a little hosed in the process. A couple of the last steps that I tried was to attempt to use another driver:
sax2 -r -m 0=ati
This bombed completely as there was no driver “ati” for sax2 to use. I then re-config’d the radeon driver:
sax2 -r -m 0=radeon
and things worked again, now such that it loads properly at boot time.
I had tried the command to load the radeon driver a couple of other times, to no avail. But I suspect that I really needed to first revert to another driver, then reload the radeon driver. Just re-configuring with the radeon driver itself, did not seem to work. If I were to try it again I’d just reconfigure with a different, known driver:
sax2 -r -m 0=vesa
then reconfigure with the radeon driver:
sax2 -r -m 0=radeon
I always do my X config stuff from level3
Good to know you are working at least;)
GUI = graphical user interface, sometimes shortened to UI, refers to control by windows and mouse and requires Xorg.
CLI = command line interface, refers to control through the command line and is the interface of choice for hardcore hackers (in the good sense).
While I didn’t installed OpenSuSE 11.2 due to other issues I had, I want to share how I fixed the X issue in the LiveCD, so people can try to see if it works on an installed system.
I resolved the X startup problem on the livecd by creating a Xorg configuration file, with:
#Xorg -configure
And copying the generated config to /etc/X11/xorg.conf. After that, was able to relaunch X as many times I wanted.
For some reason the execution of Xorg without a config fails to detect the correct ATI driver, at least on the CD.
In case any dev reads this, my card is a 4850 and used the X86-64 LiveCD.