I installed OpenSuse 13.1 on a machine last weekend and everything went pretty much by the book; this weekend I tried on another machine and no such luck. It was a mostly by the defaults install on an existing 12.3 system from DVD – I chose the new install rather than the upgrade but did not reformat /home, also chose to install SSH. When the install script finished - Firefox hung contemplating add-ons, Conqueror will not start, YaST seems to work fine, reboot or log-off hangs. I tried creating a new user and that account has the same problems. Logging in as root solves the browser, reboot and log-off problems. So - big leap here – I would hazard the guess that the install script sets the permissions on something incorrectly. Any good speculation on what that something might be?
You tell us you left /home unformatted, do you mean you imported the existing partitioning incl. mountpoints? If so, did you also import the users from the existing install?
By default the first user on a new install has UID 1000 make sure that the /home for that user is 1000 or change the UID appropriately. Note that the system use the UID not the name as the user identification the name is just for us meat bags.
You did not say your desktop???
Never log into a GUI as root. you can inadvertently damage stuff
I do not make a habit of using the GUI as root. However, in this case, in order to see if browsers were not working of their own accord or whether it is a permissions problem I did - and it seems to be a permissions problem.
Now as far as users, at install there was only one (ned) with id=1000 (in group “users”, gid=100). And yes, that user seems to have transferred just fine. I added a user (test), uid=1001 & gid=100. User test had no existing setup or history files to confuse issues but is similarly unable to raise a browser or log-off cleanly.
Current behavior of browsers for unprivileged users – Firefox displays the first tab with “connecting…” and does not change from there; Konqueror gives the bouncing globe for 30 seconds or so and disappears.
Please post the output of this run as normal user:
loginctl
This shows whether your session is correctly registered with logind. If it is not, you won’t have sufficient permissions for many things: accessing the audio device, suspend/hibernate/reboot/poweroff, connecting to a network with NetworkManager, mounting drives, direct access to the video card (which in turn could cause applications to crash or not show graphics),…
That looks ok, provided your currently logged in user is called “ned”…
Maybe a graphics driver issue? What card do you have and what driver? There has been a bug in the nvidia driver 331.20 that may cause many interesting problems…
When you log in to a different session (IceWM f.e., you can select that on the login screen by clicking on the wrench symbol), can you run Firefox or Konqueror there?
Do you get any errors when you run them in a terminal window?
Hos do you connect to the Internet? How did you set-up the connection?
Maybe your /home is full? root uses /root as home directory which is on the root partition, so may still work then.
It’s not a disk space issue; / uses 5G and has 14G available, /home uses 426G and has 470G available
The connection to the internet is working if you happen to be root - YaST is able to update just fine.
I rebooted (can’t log-out) and selected IceWM from the login screen. Brought up both Firefox and Chromium, both of which hung (for at least three minutes) with a “connecting…” message.
You may be on to something with the graphics card and driver. YaST-Hardware Information reports: nVidia VGA compatible controller, Hwcfg Bus: pci, Kernal Driver: drm
Yes, but how do you connect? Via wireless?
How did you configure the connection?
Does it work if you run “ping opensuse.org” in a terminal window as user? What output do you get?
I rebooted (can’t log-out) and selected IceWM from the login screen. Brought up both Firefox and Chromium, both of which hung (for at least three minutes) with a “connecting…” message.
OK, so it’s not specific to the desktop.
Did you run them from a terminal window? Did you get any output in the terminal window?
You may be on to something with the graphics card and driver. YaST-Hardware Information reports: nVidia VGA compatible controller, Hwcfg Bus: pci, Kernal Driver: drm
So, what graphics card is it?
And did you install any driver for it?
Post the “Model:” line from YaST->Hardware Information please. And please also post what the “Driver:” line says.
My graphics card is a EVGA GeForce GT 430 which falls into the category of NVIDIA legacy cards (GeForce 4 and older). So I found the very helpful page http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NVIDIA_drivers and followed the zypper instructions:
Add repository zypper ar –f ftp://download.nvidia.com/opensuse/13.1/ nvidia
Install zypper install x11-video-nvidia
Restart
Hitch was that the install step reported “Nothing to do” so I went to YaST-s/w management and searched for “nvidia”. The packages ending with “G01”, “G02” and “G03” for graphics cards newer and more capable than mine are there but the one for legacy cards is not. (Installing a high class driver for a low class card will put you in a place you do not want to be.)
lspci | grep VGA returns:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF108 [GeForce GT 430] (rev a1)
YaST hardware information reports that the graphics driver is: nouveau
ping opensuse.org from a terminal window as an unprivileged user results in 100% packet loss and surprising to me is that when su’ed to root in that same window, I also get 100% packet loss. And yet, I’m able to get additional packages and updates.
My connection to the internet is via wired connection, setup by the install package.
No, it isn’t.
It is a GeForce 400 series, not GeForce 4, and the latest G03 driver should support it, so install that.
Add repository zypper ar –f ftp://download.nvidia.com/opensuse/13.1/ nvidia
Install zypper install x11-video-nvidia
Restart
Hitch was that the install step reported “Nothing to do” so I went to YaST-s/w management and searched for “nvidia”. The packages ending with “G01”, “G02” and “G03” for graphics cards newer and more capable than mine are there but the one for legacy cards is not. (Installing a high class driver for a low class card will put you in a place you do not want to be.)
x11-video-nvidia is not available anymore because it doesn’t work at all in openSUSE 12.3/13.1.
You need the G03 driver anyway, so please uninstall x11-video-nvidia if it is installed, and install those packages instead:
nvidia-gfxG03-kmp-desktop, x11-video-nvidiaG03, and nvidia-computeG03.
I’m not sure that will fix your network problems though, but you should try it anyway.
I stand corrected, the G03 driver package works just fine. But you are also correct that it did not affect the problems with reboot/shutdown or the browsers. For what it’s worth, I think the fact that the shutdown and reboot selections on the main menu don’t work after a simple and clean install are pointing to the bigger problem here.
A retraction/clarification - I did the ping opensuse.org the address was translated as 130.57.5.70 and had 100% packet loss. I then did a ping google.com which was translated to 173.194.115.14 and it worked just fine both unprivileged and super user.
But why it would work as root and not as user I don’t know. Maybe that was just coincidence?
Can you try to add 8.8.8.8 as DNS server either in Yast or NetworkManger, depending on which you’re using?
That’s google’s DNS server FYI, and it should just work.
If you don’t know how to do that, feel free to ask.
I went into Network Settings and put in “8.8.8.8” into Name Server 1. No change in behavior - all packets lost to opensuse.org, talks to google.com no problem - same result unprivileged and super user. BTW, this is the same behavior as on my other OpenSuSE 13.1 system where the browsers, reboot and log-off work correctly.
Thanks for your time and consideration, you’ve been most generous.
This morning before updating the graphics driver, I reloaded the OS from DVD just to reestablish the baseline - new install, no format on /home, add SSH.
Just now I again added a new user. New user has the same problems as the old user - browsers don’t work, can’t reboot or log-off. I started firefox from a KDE icon, it stayed at a single tab “Connecting…” for minutes then I dismissed the window and got a warning from the window manager - “Application “firefox” is not responding” - I clicked on Terminate Application firefox. I then brought up a terminal window and started firefox - same behavior. I su’ed to root and ran firefox - it ran as it’s supposed to, displaying the opensuse.org front page (ping on opensuse.org still does not work). I’m assuming that GLib-CRITICAL messages are normal since I get them on my other system as well.
Also, can’t log-off/shutdown/reboot is a little over the mark; given several minutes the system will perform the desired action.
Did you by any chance try to edit /etc/resolv.conf ? If so, remove it (it will be recreated by the system):
su -c 'rm /etc/resolv.conf'
Now, if you want to use Google’s DNS’s change them through the Networkmanager or through Yast, not by editing files. BTW, /etc/resolv.conf has a statement in it on this.
