13.x. "Oh no! Something has gone wrong" after upgrade

English Install/Boot/Login
1

had openSuSE 12.3 on Celeron. Desktop Gnome.
After upgrading to 13.x (first 13.1 and then 13.2 hoping the error was solved meanwhile in the distro)
following message appears when logging in:

Oh no! Something has gone wrong. A problem has occurred and the system can’t recover. please logout and try again.

Google refers to a problem with the video driver in combination with Gnome.

Using an old NVidia RIVA TNT2 Model64/Model64 Pro video board.
installed driver xf86-video-nouveau-1.0.11-1.3.i586.rpm. according to NVidia the latest driver, but without proper result.

Have KDE installed but do not find in yast2 where to change the desktop environment.
Can this be done only during a new installation? That doesn’t look user friendly so I doubt that. This will clear my configurations (smb.conf, apache, MySQL, PHP settings…)

Any suggestions? I have no preference for the desktop environment KDE or Gnome. I am an occasional Linux user.

2

In the login screen there’s a settings option, displaying available destkop environments. Select Plasma Desktop Environment and the session manager will remember your choice. You may have to disable autologin through Yast - System - Sysconfig editor. Remove the user that logs in automatically.

3

the user does not login automatically.
The selection of the plasma desktop is during the upgrade?

4

when the login screen appears on the bottom left of your screen(assuming you didn’t change the default settings) there is a ‘wrench icon’. that will show you all the available environments. if you don’t see gnome(you never had it ) and you didn’t select it when you installed OpenSuse then you’ll have to install the gnome packages. you can find them in yast. I cannot recall the packagename. maybe someone else can let you know or search for it.

5

On 2014-11-16 17:06, herman maes wrote:
>
> the user does not login automatically.
> The selection of the plasma desktop is during the upgrade?

No, on login.

On 2014-11-16 16:36, herman maes wrote:

> Using an old NVidia RIVA TNT2 Model64/Model64 Pro video board.
> installed driver xf86-video-nouveau-1.0.11-1.3.i586.rpm. according to
> NVidia the latest driver, but without proper result.

Doubtful that NVidia says that.

On the one hand, the “nouveau” driver is the community made one, not the
NVidia made one. They do not support it. On the other hand, NVidia makes
its own driver, proprietary, and should be version 331 or a bit greater.
It is not installed automatically, but manually by you, either the easy
way or the hard way.

If previous to the upgrade you had the proprietary driver installed,
after the upgrade it normally breaks, and you have to install it again.
Or, uninstall it completely and use instead the default, system, open,
community driver, or nouveau - which is normally the recommended thing
to do in Linux, if it works, because it doesn’t break. On the other
hand, it is not as capable. No 3D on hardware, limited or no HW
acceleration. For desktop applications, does not matter. For CAD, games,
graphical intensive simulations, it does.

Whichever direction you want to take, ask. Find out first what you had
installed previously.

If made “the easy way”, this will tell:


cp /var/lib/rpm/Packages /dev/null
rpm -qa | grep -i nvidia

(the first line is optional, but speeds up the query if you have ample RAM)

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)

6

That card is at least 11 years old I doubt there is a NVIDIA driver that will work with it since NVIDIA drops support on older cards. If nouveau driver does not work. Note that the card is older then the driver development I think. You will have to drop back to the VGA driver which is not a great driver but should work. Older NVIDA drivers simply will not compile against newer kernels.

The error message ( a gnome message) is probably due to an attempt install a non functional NVIDIA driver. NVIDIA drivers change the the mesa program and essential break any other fall back driver.

If you uninstall the NVIIDA it should bring back the unchanged mesa program and allow other drivers to function.

7

When the login screen shows, before entering your login password, you should see a wrench icon on the same page. Click on that wrench icon and you should get a popup with the desktop choices.

Also, run the command robin_listas asked you to from a terminal prompt and post the output here. The info is needed to help you get your video driver sorted out.

8

That card is even 15 years old.
Support for it has been dropped years ago.

The last driver version that supports it is the 71.86.15 driver (latest version is from 2011), which doesn’t work any more with current kernels and Xorg versions.

If the nouveau driver doesn’t work good enough for GNOME (which unconditionally requires good OpenGL support), you have basically two options:

  • use something else than GNOME
  • add “nomodeset” to the boot options to disable nouveau. This will use the generic fbdev or vesa driver and software OpenGL rendering (slow of course, but with that card probably the best you can get)

In the second case, you might create an xorg.conf.d snippet to use the “nv” driver instead (or maybe it’s even used automatically when using “nomodeset”, I’m not sure at the moment), to get decent 2D acceleration at least. But “nv” doesn’t support 3D acceleration at all, so even then GNOME probably would not be the best choice…

9

Thanks Carlos, but rpm -qa | grep -i NVidia
does not give any result, no message, just the next line prompt.

10

I found that wrench.
unfortunately, selecting it to KDE Plasma does not show properly the windows, some icons on the header form but clicking does not cause any action (maybe I do not see it), some horizontal lines,
KDE4 is not listed. I thought I installed it too.
TWM results in a nice light blue screen but no icons, actions,…
IceWM allows me to use firefox, etc

command robin_listas or cnf robin_listas is not known by the system.

11

Using another desktop:
unfortunately, selecting it to KDE Plasma does not show properly the windows, some icons on the header form but clicking does not cause any action (maybe I do not see it), some horizontal lines,
KDE4 is not listed. I thought I installed it too.
TWM results in a nice light blue screen but no icons, actions,…
IceWM allows me to use firefox, etc but very, very slow.

I am not familiar with boot options. could you tell me where to find?
Similar for the xorg.conf.d.

thx

12

Try disabling desktop effects by pressing Alt+Shift+F12.

KDE4 is not listed. I thought I installed it too.

There is no KDE4 entry.
KDE4 is in fact “KDE Plasma Desktop”. Plasma is the name of KDE(4)'s desktop shell.

TWM results in a nice light blue screen but no icons, actions,…

That’s how it looks. It’s rather minimal.
Click on the desktop with either mouse button.

I am not familiar with boot options. could you tell me where to find?
Similar for the xorg.conf.d.

xorg.conf.d is a directory in /etc/X11/, but let’s keep that for later, it might not even be necessary.

You can set the boot options in YaST->System->Boot Loader->Boot Loader Options. Append “nomodeset” to “Optional Kernel Command Line Parameter”.

13

I am not able to TAB to the ‘Bootloader options’, even the t is yellow highlighted.
Is it the same as entering the boot option at the start of the upgrade process?

14

found the howto.

15

found it! simply had to use the arrow keys.
but the res of 640x480 is terrible.

16

[QUOTE=herman_maes;2677080]found it! simply had to use the arrow keys.
but the res of 640x480 is terrible./QUOTE

I couldn’t change the display resolution in all settings - hardware - display.

Then I changed in the boot loader options - Kernal Parameters the VGA mode to 1280x1024 16b and the console resolution to 1208x1024
and I have to workable screen.

Thanks a lot guys.
I own you one!

17

Ok, so you figured it out on your own.

Apparently you are using the generic fbdev driver now, which carries over the Grub and console resolution into the graphical system.

As mentioned, it might be better to use the “xv” driver. It should support your card quite well, although it has absolutely no 3D support (but fbdev hasn’t either).
If you want to try it, create a file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ (named 50-nv.conf e.g., but the actual name doesn’t really matter) with the following content:

Section "Device"
  Identifier "Default Device"
  Driver "nv"
EndSection

You can do that with the following command e.g.:

kdesu kwrite /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-nv.conf

If it works, great.
If it gives you problems, just remove that file again.

If graphics mode doesn’t work at all for some reason, you should always be able to boot to a graphical session by choosing “Advanced Options”->“openSUSE xxx (recovery mode)” in the boot menu.

JFYI, “man nv” says this:

DESCRIPTION
nv is an Xorg driver for NVIDIA video cards. The driver supports 2D
acceleration and provides support for the following framebuffer depths: 8,
15, 16 (except Riva128) and 24. All visual types are supported for depth
8, TrueColor and DirectColor visuals are supported for the other depths
with the exception of the Riva128 which only supports TrueColor in the
higher depths.

SUPPORTED HARDWARE
The nv driver supports PCI, PCI-Express and AGP video cards based on the
following NVIDIA chips:

   **RIVA 128**              NV3

   **RIVA TNT**              NV4

   **RIVA TNT2**             NV5

…

18

Great! Indeed better performance. Acceptable for me on a Celeron based system. Thanks a lot!

19

On 2014-11-17 20:56, herman maes wrote:

> Thanks Carlos, but rpm -qa | grep -i NVidia
> does not give any result, no message, just the next line prompt.

That’s good :slight_smile:

In Linux and Unix typical command behaviour, a no response means
success. In this case you get nothing because there is no rpm installed
containing “nvidia” in their names, and it is good that you do not have
any, because then you do not have to remove them.

Command explanation:

“rpm -qa” is a “query all rpm packages” list.

Then the vertical bar is called “pipe”, meaning that the entire list
generated is fed to the next command, as is.

The next command, the “grep -i NVidia” means "find and print only those
lines that contains “nvidia” anywhere, in lower case, uppercase, or any
combination.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)

20

On 2014-11-17 21:06, herman maes wrote:
>
> Fraser_Bell;2676751 Wrote:

>> Also, run the command robin_listas asked you to from a terminal prompt

> command robin_listas or cnf robin_listas is not known by the system.

LOL.

“robin_listas” is my forum name, not a command. :slight_smile:

he was asking you to post here the command that I told you to run on
another post. Which you already did, so you don’t need to do anything more.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)