Can not login to KDE after fresh install

Hi there,
I am experiencing problems starting a Plasma/KDE session after a fresh Leap 42.1 installlation.

I installed Leap 42.1 from an installation DVD. I used legacy mode (not EFI), because I want to continue using my legacy Win7 installation and installed
GRUB2 to a separate boot partition (ext2). I used ext4 for the root and home partitions. After the installation the boot manager worked fine and I can boot into Win 7.

When booting open Suse the login screen appears. When I choose Plasma5/KDE and try to login the screen goes black for a second and the login screen reappears. I can however start an iceVM session and/or login in the command line. Before this installation I was using open Suse 13.1 with KDE with no problems.

I am using an intel xeon e3-1245 processor with integrated graphics and additionally a graphics adapter with nVidia GTX 960 chipset. My preferred configuration (that I also used in the past) was using the integrated graphics for graphics and the nVidia card for GPGPU purposes only. My Bios settings are such that the integrated graphics are selected as graphics adapter. I read about Bumblebee, but it does not seem to be what I need because I am working on a desktop and do not need automatic selection of the graphic device and instead always want to use the integrated graphics except for GPGPU.

I really want to solve this, because I think it would be a real shame if I had to switch to another distribution, because of this. Any suggestions ?
Thanks in advance!!

update:

I tried different things and eventually reinstalled the system (doing the same as before). I then got some weird kernel panic errors and got all mad and checked the installation DVD using the ‘check installation media’ option (or sth similar) which told me the DVD was broken.
Next I removed the graphic card from my machine and reinstalled the system using the network installation. After that my computer booted straight into the KDE Desktop and it seems like everything is working!
So I am not sure if it was the broken DVD or the graphics card or both that cause Suse Leap to be not working, but I am guessing it is rather related to the graphics card because as said before iceVM was working fine on my first try.

Now I put back the graphics card and after booting I saw a black screen with a cursor. Ctrl+F8 (toggle virtual desktops) showed me a symbol showing two ‘empty’ desktops with no background image, task bar etc.

I pressed Ctrl+Alt+F2 and perfectly got to the console view.
The command lspci now lists two (!) VGA compatible controllers, one is the built in graphics the other is the graphics card:

Intel corporation Xeon E3-1200 v2/3rd Gen Core Processor (rev 09), kernel driver in use: i915, kernel modules: nouveau
NVIDIA corp. GM206 (GeForce GTX960) rev a1, kernel driver in use: nouveau, kernel modules: nouveau

What confuses me a little is that my processor is E3-1245 not 1200 (??)

Apparently the system now tries to use the graphics card, but something fails and therefore KDE does not get displayed correctly. I would now like to somehow tell the system to use the built-in graphics again (as it did before I put back the graphics card) and install the nvidia drivers to use the card for GPGPU (install cuda).

Either way if somebody has similar problems: try to reinstall with the graphics card being removed!

I wish I had seen this thread earlier. Maybe I could have saved you the effort of reinstall.

If Icewm is good, but KDE/Plasma 5 doesn’t work, this is usually a video problem. Plasma 5 seems to have problems with nouveau.

Login to Icewm, and install the nvidia drivers for your card. I recommend installing from the nvidia repo.

Alternatively, if you want to stick with nouveau, then login to Icewm and edit the file “$HOME/.config/kwinrc”.

There should be a section that begins “[Compositing]”.
In that section, there will be a line:

OpenGLIsUnsafe=false

Change that “false” to “true”.

You should then be able to login to Plasma 5. Maybe set compositing to use XRender, and you will get some desktop effects back.

Hi! Thank you very much for your help.
When I ran zypper install-new-recommends the following package came up:
xf86-video-nv (2.1.20-11.1)
I guess this is a nouveau update ?
After installing it the desktop worked again. I have not tried with cuda yet, but probably need the proprietary nvidia drivers for this.
Is there a way how I can find out which graphic device is actually being used to render the graphics ?

I’m not sure, but maybe “kinfocenter” will tell you that.

I’m not sure if you should be using Bumblebee for managing two different graphics adaptors. Maybe google around.

ok, I added the nvidia repo:

sudo zypper addrepo -f http://download.nvidia.com/opensuse/leap/42.1/ nvidia

and did another

zypper install-new-recommends

installing nvidia-gfxG04-kmp-default-352.55_k4.1.12 gives literally thousands of lines of additional rpm output
with mostly warnings about signed/unsigned integer comparison, but also showing

ERROR: Kernel configuration is invalid, include/generated/autoconf.h or include/config/auto.conf are missing

at some point

after that lspci shows both nouveau and nvidia as kernel modules for the graphic card and the system crashes on boot ending
in a black screen. I can boot using boot option ‘3’, which shows an error message

drm:intel_set_pch_fifo_underrun_reporting [i915] *ERROR* uncleared pch fifo underrun on pch transcoder A
drm:cpt_irq_handler [i915] *ERROR* PCH transcoder A FIFO underrun

and the same for transcoder B

I now removed the packages nvidia-glG04 and x11-video-nvidiaG04 again and the KDE environment displays again.
right now I do not care anymore which device is rendering the graphics as long as I finally get a somewhat running system…

it looks like you didn’t have the kernel headers installed
the nvidia driver comes semi build they recompile a few modules and need kernel-default-devel and gcc installed.
nv is not nouveau it’s a old open source nvidia 2D only driver, it has been abandoned for years, do not use nv it’s extremely buggy.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia_kills_nv&num=1

maybe you can post your repo list

zypper lr -d

I am using an intel xeon e3-1245 processor with integrated graphics and additionally a graphics adapter with nVidia GTX 960 chipset. My preferred configuration (that I also used in the past) was using the integrated graphics for graphics and the nVidia card for GPGPU purposes only. My Bios settings are such that the integrated graphics are selected as graphics adapter. I read about Bumblebee, but it does not seem to be what I need because I am working on a desktop and do not need automatic selection of the graphic device and instead always want to use the integrated graphics except for GPGPU.

do not install any sort of nvidia compatible driver if using intel’s build in card none will work, my personal recommendation is to set nvidia as the prefered graphic card in bios and install nvidia’s G04 driver.
You seam to want an optimus system but you have a 2 card intel+nvidia you can not do live on the fly switching with your rig you can use intel or nvidia it’s your choice but you have to set it in bios, the intel card does not need any extra drivers as it is supported by the kernel but nvidia is superior and can offload a lot of extra processing from the cpu.

You might have a look at suse-prime. I don’t know if your hardware supports off-loading the NVIDIA to the Intel ( NVIDIA sends rendered output through the Intel, which has the display connected ) works on your hardware. Do you have a BIOS option to use both cards?

Ok thats interesting you are right nv is not nouveau. kernel-default and kernel-default-devel (as well as gcc) are installed on my machine,
do I need to include anything else (are the headers not in the devel package ?). Fortunately so far I have no problems with the nv driver,
but installing all the nvidia drivers definitely lead to problems.

here is my repo list:

# | Alias               | Name                              | Enabled | GPG Check | Refresh | Priority | Type   | URI                                                                      | Service
--+---------------------+-----------------------------------+---------+-----------+---------+----------+--------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+--------
1 | ftp.gwdg.de-suse    | Packman Repository                | Yes     | (r ) Yes  | Yes     |   20     | rpm-md | http://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/packman/suse/openSUSE_Leap_42.1/            |        
2 | nvidia              | nvidia                            | Yes     | (r ) Yes  | Yes     |   99     | rpm-md | http://download.nvidia.com/opensuse/leap/42.1/                           |        
3 | openSUSE-42.1-0     | openSUSE-42.1-0                   | Yes     | (r ) Yes  | Yes     |   99     | yast2  | http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/leap/42.1/repo/oss/            |        
4 | openSUSE_Leap_42.1  | KDE Extra                         | Yes     | (r ) Yes  | Yes     |   30     | rpm-md | http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Extra/openSUSE_Leap_42.1/ |        
5 | repo-non-oss        | openSUSE-Leap-42.1-Non-Oss        | Yes     | (r ) Yes  | Yes     |   99     | yast2  | http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/leap/42.1/repo/non-oss/        |        
6 | repo-update         | openSUSE-Leap-42.1-Update         | Yes     | (r ) Yes  | Yes     |   99     | rpm-md | http://download.opensuse.org/update/leap/42.1/oss/                       |        
7 | repo-update-non-oss | openSUSE-Leap-42.1-Update-Non-Oss | Yes     | (r ) Yes  | Yes     |   99     | rpm-md | http://download.opensuse.org/update/leap/42.1/non-oss/                   |        



my idea was to use the graphics card for computation only and do not put additional load of the graphical rendering on it. also the fan on the graphic card is rather loud. I do not need any graphics besides desktop use and some videos. I will check the bios again!

in my bios I can choose to use the integrated graphics or the card (I can set ‘Initiate Graphic Adapter’ to IGD or PEG). It is set to IGD and has been set to this value for a long time. This is also what I want, the graphics should be rendered by the built in processor. If I install the nvidia graphics drivers the kde environment does not work.

To use CUDA you need the CUDA driver. If you also need the video driver I don’t know. But this is a NVIDIA issue and perhaps should be taken up on the NVIDIA fourm

Ok! This became a suse issue, because I did a fresh install (having an nvidia card and an intel processor with built-in graphics in my system, not an unusual setting!) and
was welcomed by a black screen. also following the usual advice to install the nvidia drivers (e.g. SDB:NVIDIA drivers - openSUSE Wiki) lead to similar (or even more) problems. maybe I should have switched to the external graphics in bios before the installation, but as a matter of fact the suse installation was rather problematic when the nvidia card was installed.

This is a NVIDIA issue since they modify the X stack which breaks other drivers and it is important that you distinguish between just having Intel gpu and NVIDIA gpu on a desktop and the optimus hardware configuration used on laptops.On top the nouveau driver (the OS NVIDIA driver) does not like plasma 5 for some hardware. This can make it a small challenge to get a working configuration on even a clean install. Most people just turn off the Intel if they can on desktops since getting both Intel and NIVIDA, two different brand of GPU, to work to together is a huge challenge

so your suggestion for my setup (desktop) would be to switch to the graphic card in bios (hence ‘turn off the intel’) and install the nvidia drivers (that would be the ‘small challenge’) ?

No if you did not have a operational GUI it would be since you would need to do it fro the command line yast or zypper