Installation of openSUSE for the desktop is working okay but occasionally, the bootup can be very slow, approximately 3-4 minutes.
The white bar below the lizard basically freeze without moving.
How can I switch to text mode to see what is happening instead of just looking at the splash screen?
On Fri, 20 Nov 2009 04:56:01 +0000, michalng wrote:
> How can I switch to text mode to see what is happening instead of just
> looking at the splash screen?
Hit the escape key - that’ll give you the text screen.
Jim
–
Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Moderator
Thanks, the ESC key works during normal times.
however during the “slow” boot, I’ve tried ESC and CRTL-ESC but it still hangs at the lizard splash screen.
Anyway, thanks for sharing.
Before booting SuSE type splash=verbose in the grub or was just it just verbose.
vga=ask will definitely also give you a text only mode 
If you want to use the ESC, just push it as soon as the boot starts. When it
hangs, it may not be responding.
You may also be having an fsck being run on one or more of your partitions. The
default check interval or the maximum mount count might have been set quite low.
You can check that with the command
sudo /sbin/tune2fs -l <device name such as /dev/sda1>
The tune2fs command can also change the parameters.
> You may also be having an fsck being run on one or more of your partitions.
right, michalng make SURE you shut your machine down the correct
way…not just power off or Ctrl+Alt+something…
many ways to do that, my way is:
right click on desktop
pick Log Out “[my user name]”
pick “Turn Off Computer”
if you are having troubles causing you to do otherwise please describe
so they can be fixed for you…
BEFORE you just hit the power switch, TRY this:
[machinename] login:
shutdown -h now
and press enter…the machine should shut down (to power off) safely
and not cause an fsck on next boot…
if you don’t wanna power off, but just reboot, type
shutdown -r now
-enjoy-
–
palladium
If the user is seeing the white progress bar below the lizard, he is already into loading KDE, so the ESC key won’t do anything. Editing GRUB to add splash=verbose is correct, but won’t help since he is past this point.
The boot log should give us some clues. I am at work and can’t look to paste in the path to it. I know someone can handle that part though. 
hello all,
thanks for the advise
palladium,
shutting down is always done the normal way,
Wilson_Phillips, Chrysantine
I’ve justed edited grub to splash=verbose, better to know what is happening than to have nice pictures during boot
lwfinger
it is possible that the system is doing a fsck during bootup.
however, I forget to mention that the system after a very slow boot up, upon login, will have very very laggy system performance.
Anyway, so far after several boots ups, the slowness does not happen, will update here if it happens again.
Thanks again to everyone!
Isn’t it the login process that was very slow ?
Today, I login my Gnome desktop as usual, and suddenly saw an error requester saying something like “Cannot update .ICEauthority”. Indeed, my ~/.ICEauthority is now locked (root access only). Acknowledging the error, I could enter the Gnome session.
Later, I tried to login with the KDE desktop. And as a matter of fact, the login process was VERY slow, ending up with about the same error message, but with the impossibility to start KDE ( -> back to the login screen).
What is this ICEauthority thing anyway ? And why does it need (as it seems) to talk to the network while login ?
After some searches, I’ve learned a bit more about that ‘.ICEauthority’ file and how to avoid the access problem.
See this thread: Re: could not update iceauthority/var/something/.iceauthorit