Black screen instead of login manager

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Greets everyone.

I’m having a rather peculiar problem booting into openSUSE 11.2. After the installation (which goes fine), i get a black screen and my system freezes.

In detail, I can see the splash screen and booting details, but at the moment I am supposed to see a login manager, i just get a black screen. Sometimes it has a cursor indicator in the top left, sometimes it doesn’t. Same thing happens in failsafe mode too.

This happens over and over, no matter which installation type I choose, 32bit or 64bit, KDE/Gnome/XFCE.

My problematic box is:
AMD Athlon 3200+ 64bit
2GB DDR
ATI Radeon x1950pro ← which I believe might be causing all these issues.

It’s rather tedious to see this happening again and again. Any help will be appreciated.

2

Indeed ATI is the likely cause
Check here: ATI - openSUSE
I’m not an ATI user, you need to see what the driver situation is. ATI are not doing a good job ATM.
Try failsafe for now, it might let you in to a desktop

3

I did try failsafe, it yielded the same results. The only thing I haven’t tried is install without display managers, maybe I’ll be able to get into the console that way.

4

Check this thread over
How Do I Install New (to the computer) video card - openSUSE Forums

5

Thanks, I’ll try that from the link.

However, the problem is most definitely in my graphic card. I’ve tried booting core Sabayon and it died the same way openSUSE does (after Xorg -configure).

My next attempt (if the upper doesn’t work) will probably be a highly dirty attempt of finding a working xorg.conf and injecting it into the installation with a liveCD help.

I’ll post if this solution works.

6

Same problem on IMac with ATI HD 2400 XT. Neither booting in runlevel 3 nor in failsafe mode could help. I finally reinstalled 11.1 on that machine.

No problem however on another machine with Radeon HD 4350 (RV710).

7

Hello.
I’m having the same issue, I think. I have the same graphic chip, the x1950 Pro.

I recently installed opensuse 11.2 on my machine (dual boot with vista ultimate64), and it never booted properly. It always hangs with a frozen top-left cursor after the splash screen.

This is kinda ironic, since I used Suse some years ago, and went back to windows, because ATI support was very poor. I was now hoping it would be better, but hey, same thing 4 or 5 years later. I had a 9800XT at the time. Now ATI says my x1950 is legacy… Truth is, being a linux newbie doesn’t help at all, but I cannot even start to learn about it if I can’t get past these issues.
Anyway, rant aside, I’m not fully understanding that link with the Radeon driver instructions (Radeon).

How to install the driver

If you installed openSUSE 11.2 on a computer with a Radeon 7200 - X1950, the radeon driver should already be installed and running

Ok. That, I can see it’s not. The system hangs while booting.

Before you begin

* Make sure your card is supported by the radeon driver.
* If your current setup is working, make a back up of your xorg.conf (if you have one) and note what driver you are using, so you can revert to a working configuration if you have to.
* Log out of your graphical session, and set the system to runlevel 3.
      o This can be done by switching to a vtty by hitting Ctrl-Alt-F1, logging in at the prompt, and then running the following as root:
        $ init 3
  • My card is supported
  • Current setup not working

How do I do it? Should I type $ init 3 as a parameter on GRUB? That’s the only interaction I have with opensuse before the system completely hangs.

Another question: Is it really worth it? Because:

It is in many respects better than the proprietary fglrx driver, though the 3D performance is not as good.

If I’m going to have a system bottlenecked by the OS, I might as well go back to windows. Or should I try another distro?

Thanks for any help.

8

In the interest of providing some “practical” theory/guidance, I typed up the following guide for ATI, nVidia, and Intel graphic users:
openSUSE Graphic Card Practical Theory Guide for Users - openSUSE Forums
… hopefully it will be of some help.

9

Run Level 3

Now typically, when reconfiguring a graphic card, it is best to do this NOT in X window, but rather in the full screen terminal run level 3. One boots to run level 3 by pressing “3” (no quotes) when the very first menu (the initial grub boot menu) appears. By pressing “3” one will see the “3” appear in the options line. Then boot normally. That brings one to a full screen text login. Login as a regular user. Then after logged in, type “su” (no quotes - enter root password) to switch users to the administrator/root.

I insert 3 on the boot options and it still hangs in the same place.

10

Did you try booting to the “Fail Safe” or “Safe Settings” ?

11

Yes. Tried normal and failsafe boot. Adding 3 to the parameter line does nothing at all. Still hangs with the frozen cursor.

By the way, my full specs are:

athlon64 4000+ san diego (single core)
msi k8n neo2 platinum mainboard
dual channeled 2gb ddr ram
saphire ati x1950 pro agp

How about installing opensuse 11.1 from scratch? Since the guides I read talked about an incompatibility with 11.2, would it be a feasible workaround?

12

This is a snip from the factory mailing list
I have just done a zypper dup on the laptop now i am unable to boot the
machine with using x11 failsafe and radeon.modset=0 on the grub command
line without these the machine does not boot fully goes black screen and is
dead no ssh into it no keyboard nothing at all have to force a hard restart to
regain control <end snip>

You can boot via your cd/dvd and mount your root partition and

cat/mount point/var/log/xorg.0.log and tail /*/var/log/warn
for any clues

13

I’m sorry to say, but I did not understand what you were trying to explain. As I said before, I’m new to linux despite having used it a few years ago.

After breaking my head around this, I’m going back to winblows, yet again. I shouldn’t feel obligated by any “company” to buy nVidia so I have proper driver support. All these Ati issues are contradicting Linux philosophy, in my point of view.

Thank you for all your speedy replies. I wish I knew more about linux so I could try other approaches, but once again, the “big corporation” limits the end user by obligating him to upgrade to newer hardware. An ati x1950 pro is a perfectly capable video card.

Again, thanks. :wink:

14

Rather than waste your time trying to install, why not try a liveCD? That is why the liveCD’s were created, so one could obtain a limited compatibility test, without going thru the time required for an installation, and without going thru the commitment of an installation.

You can find liveCD’s for openSUSE-11.1 and 11.2 here:

Ensure you do the md5sum check on the downloaded iso file against the value on the CD web site, else it is a complete waste of time. Also burn the CD/DVD NOT to an RW but to a R+ or R- of high quality at the slowest speed your burner allows.