I just tried to upgrade from 11.3 to 11.4 Using iso on DVD.
All went well until the stage where the screen says something like “rebooting from installed system” when the screen just went blank.
After removal of the DVD and re-start of the system, selecting the normal Desktop from the boot menu just returns me to the blank screen. I never see a login screen.
Selecting Failsafe caused what appeared to be a complete normal sequence with a Login that worked and I ended up in KDE4 (my usual desktop) with everything apparently working, even WIFI.
But the next time I re-booted and selected Failsafe I just got a command prompt.
I now find that selecting Failsafe alternates between the GUI and a command prompt on each attempt!
Could something be weird in my /boot/grub/menu.lst?
If this works, tell us more about your video on this computer. The nomodeset kernel load option will not really be in bold, I just did this for it to show up better to you.
Thanks.
Adding nomodeset made no difference.
But adding x11failsafe worked.
I use a high-resolution monitor, and by the looks of it, my video performance hasn’t suffered noticeably compared to before the upgrade to 11.4.
Graphics card is ATI Radeon HD 5770, which I finally got working decently in November after the new ati driver finally came out (ati-driver-installer-10-11-x86.x86_64.run.)
All was OK before my attempted upgrade to 11.4 this past Saturday.
My guess is that with 11.3 you were using either the proprietary AMD Catalyst (fglrx) driver, or you were using the radeon or VESA or FBDEV graphic driver.
openSUSE-11.4 will nominally attempt to use the ‘radeon’ open source graphic driver when booting with AMD graphic hardware. With same hardware, if one specifies ‘nomodeset’ openSUSE will instead try to use the ‘radeonhd’ graphic driver. If one boots to failsafe the boot option x11failsafe will be used and openSUSE will instead try to use either the FBDEV (frame buffer) or VESA driver.
Now to see what graphic hardware the ‘radeon’ driver supports, type in a terminal:
man radeon
If you do that, you will see support for:
JUNIPER Radeon HD 5750/5770
suggesting your HD 5770 should be supported
However there is a bug in openSUSE-11.4 that myself and others raised, that if one boots openSUSE-11.4 with some AMD Radeon hardware, 11.4 will just freeze immediately after the kernel load. The boot can ONLY be accomplished by using the ‘nomodeset’ boot code. That will ‘get by’ the bug, but unfortunately it will also force a default loading of the ‘radeonhd’ driver.
If one types
man radeonhd
one will see that the HD 5770 is NOT listed and in fact, it is NOT supported by the ‘radeonhd’ driver, as Novell/SuSE-GmbH announced some time back that they no longer support the development of that driver.
I see that you have some various options.
Try forcing the ‘radeon’ driver with the ‘nomodest’ boot code. You can do this by editing your PC /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-device.conf file, uncommenting the ‘radeon’ line so that it reads:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Default Device"
Driver "radeon"
## Required magic for radeon/radeonhd drivers; output name
## (here: "DVI-0") can be figured out via 'xrandr -q'
#Option "monitor-DVI-0" "Default Monitor"
EndSection
Note the # in front of “Driver” was removed above. Then reboot, specify ‘nomodeset’ as a boot code, and see if you can boot with the ‘radeon’ driver (as opposed to the ‘radeonhd’ driver.
.
Try to boot with the VESA driver. This is not my favourite option, but you can do this by editing the /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-device.conf file to read:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Default Device"
#Driver "radeon"
Driver "vesa"
## Required magic for radeon/radeonhd drivers; output name
## (here: "DVI-0") can be figured out via 'xrandr -q'
#Option "monitor-DVI-0" "Default Monitor"
EndSection
Note the line I added. Then reboot and test, trying this with and without the ‘nomodeset’ argument. Performance with the ‘vesa’ driver is not so good.
.
Try to boot with the FBDEV driver. There are easier ways to do this (such as booting with the x11failesafe boot code), but you can also do this by editing the /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-device.conf file to read:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Default Device"
#Driver "radeon"
Driver "fbdev"
## Required magic for radeon/radeonhd drivers; output name
## (here: "DVI-0") can be figured out via 'xrandr -q'
#Option "monitor-DVI-0" "Default Monitor"
EndSection
Note the line I added. Then reboot and test, trying this with and without the ‘nomodeset’ argument. Performance with the ‘fbdev’ driver is poor/limited.
.
Install the proprietary AMD Catalsyst 11.3 driver. It should support the HD 5770 really well on openSUSE 11.4. I have not provided a link here as you are familiar with openSUSE and I assume you know about this. If not just post, and advice can be given.
I also recommend BEFORE trying the above, you install the program Midnight Commander (mc) and then if you get stuck in a text mode you can run it by typing ‘mc’ (no quotes) and follow its menus for editing files in text mode. It can be VERY handy if a graphic boot mode one is testing does not work.
Thanks for your help.
I will try your suggestions this weekend when I have more time.
Then I will post the results.
Meanwhile, my work-around (x11failsafe) permits me to continue working until then.
I have been using open suse 11.2 with Gnome desktop. I just upgraded to 11.4 and have had all kind of problems. 11.4 can’t recognize parallel ports for printers, so I had to go with USB. It has a major problem with going to sleep and never waking up. I get the black screen and have to press the reset button on the Dell Dimension 4500 to reboot it since I can’t see anything on the screen. I tried turning off the screen saver, extending it to 2 hrs, etc. Nothing works. 11.2 worked fine and didn’t have all these bugs. I am a newbee to Linux, so please don’t give me commands to write as I won’t know how to do it. Isn’t there a simple fix to this? I am ready to try another distribution or go back to 11.2.
I have been using open suse 11.2 with Gnome desktop. I just upgraded to 11.4 and have had all kind of problems. 11.4 can’t recognize parallel ports for printers, so I had to go with USB. It has a major problem with going to sleep and never waking up. I get the black screen and have to press the reset button on the Dell Dimension 4500 to reboot it since I can’t see anything on the screen. I tried turning off the screen saver, extending it to 2 hrs, etc. Nothing works. 11.2 worked fine and didn’t have all these bugs. I am a newbee to Linux, so please don’t give me commands to write as I won’t know how to do it. Isn’t there a simple fix to this? I am ready to try another distribution or go back to 11.2.
I am sorry to hear of your problems deanomite. I might suggest you create a new message of your own at the following location and to not piggy back onto another message thread.
It is OK to start your own message and may get more help when the original title does represent the exact problem that you have. I would like to add that I always recommend you do a clean install and not an upgrade. If you created a separate /home area, just make sure it is set to be mounted only and to not reformat it. That way, you do need to reload your applications, but all of your personnel settings are maintained. Once you reload any missing applications, your settings will still be there, clear down to the wallpaper that you have selected. Doing a real upgrade can cause mixed program versions which can render odd things to occur which can not easily be fixed.
Please start a new thread. In my view you will most unfortunately not get the help you need with a thread title “Black Screen after 11.3 > 11.4 upgrade)”.
Note as an interim measure you could try booting to the FailSafe mode. Or simply type ‘nomodeset’ (no quotes) in the first boot menu that appears (so that ‘nomodeset’ appears in the options line).
