Can now enter a log in, but then graphical part of 13.2 freezes and won't finish loading

English Applications
1

After some prior struggle, I have just gotten my new 13.2 partition to boot, by modifying the grub for my MBR boot loader so that I got another section that looks like this (just posting this in case how I’m starting 13.2 has anything to do with my problem):
Code:
###Don’t change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: other###
title New SuSE Chainloaded
rootnoverify (hd0,7)
chainloader +1
Here’s the new problem (THANKS to all who helped so far!): Now I come up to a new menu, and taking the first option from my 13.2 menu, I get a chance to log in. Some messages go by quickly, ending with a couple that look like:

MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC
nouveau E DISPLAY][0000:03:00.0]01:0130 func 08 lookup failed, -2

(the above may be trivial and may just be a coincidence; I’ve always gotten a few errors in the log while my old SuSE (12.3) was starting up but things worked fine once startup was finished; just mentioning the above because they are the last thing that I remember seeing for a moment before GUI starts up.)

Once GUI starts up, I get the familiar box with pictures of a hard disk, some tools, a globe, something that looks like a chart, and finally a “K” for KDE, all of which always went from blurry to sharp focus when my old SuSE started up, before I got a desktop.

With new SuSE, I get the new green start-up wallpaper, and in the box in the middle, the picture of a hard disk goes from blurry to sharp focus, other pictures in box stay blurry (if they come on at all), and the whole thing freezes up and I have to re-boot.

But now there is one thing that I can do, which could be helpful in debugging: even after the graphical screen freezes, I can still do the Ctrl-alt-F# (in this case I did F2), and go to a text console and look at files. Looked at a boot log and an Xorg log in /var/log but didn’t find anything that I could see as helpful.

Ideas for why this freezes up?. Thanks in advance.

2

What video card??

3

Getting the part number from the build of my machine from Dell, and looking it up on Amazon:
"Genuine Dell DT240 DK315 CH484 NVIDIA GeForce 7300LE 128MB PCIe x16 DVI VGA Video Graphics Card

                    by                                                      [NVIDIA](http://www.amazon.com/NVIDIA/b/ref=bl_dp_s_web_2530035011?ie=UTF8&node=2530035011&field-lbr_brands_browse-bin=NVIDIA)
  • Genuine Dell NVIDIA GeForce 7300 LE Video Card
  • Ports: 1x DVI Port, 1x VGA Port, 1x S-Video TV Out Port
  • Bracket Size: Full Height , Interface: PCI-Express x16
  • Memory Size: 128 MB, System Type: PC, DRIVERS NOT INCLUDED (But available for free download direct from Nvidia)"

(I’m assuming that the drivers that they’re talking about are Windows drivers.)

4

Yes and no there are proprietary NVIDIA drivers from NVIDIA that you can install. The Web is probably referring to the Windows but there are Linux too.

How much memory in that machine. Seems a bit older??

Try booting to recovery mode. that will force different drivers. Select advanced at the boot menu and then recovery mode.

5

Recovery mode worked; rather lo-res screen, though :slight_smile:

Actually machine was upped from 1G RAM to 4G a few weeks ago (I’m pretty sure that system sees it because it shows up in the gkrellm that I have running in my older SuSE)

In fact, working from the 13.2 right now…

Wants to run about 316 updates. Good idea to do them right away? (Perhaps the Nvidia driver I need is somewhere in there?). Won’t run them right now, but planning to do so sometime soon when I can stay near the machine to let them run.

Looking ahead for if the driver isn’t in the updates, went to nvidia.com and page referred me to geforce.com . Might have to make an inquiry of them because I don’t see 7300 in their lists (closest thing I see is a Geforce 7 Series).

6

Yes update

No NVIDIA driver won’t be there, you must install that.

https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NVIDIA_drivers

7

I’ve got exactly the same issue after having it (opensuse 13.2 KDE) run well for a month or two. My hardware setup is very different: HP XW8400 dual quad-core xeon 2.66, 16GB RAM 4tb sata array, ATI Radeon HD4870 X2 2GB gddr5. Obviously it is not an NVIDIA issue. Since it was occassionally frozen only after complaining about “kernel panic” and something not being synchronised and then switching to consol mode before freezing and because I got tired from keep rebooting and trying to figure out what went wrong I wiped the system. It could have been a hardware fault, but since, I reinstalled windows 7, cloned it and allowed the clone to update to windows 10 the system work fine again, thus it’s very unlikely.

I only used the opensuse repository to install/try apps. I also managed to install brother’s networked printer/scanner drivers for MFC-J6510DW without a hickup when I installed the system. Since system worked for two months or so and I used it only to evaluate if it’s a better fit for my style than windows 10 that I really dislike, I did refrain from tweaking anything that could foreseeably scr*w up the system. However, since I am not too familiar with linux I allowed the system to autoupdate. I tried to check what was updated but most of the time I got impatient to wait until the update descriptions loaded (painfully slow if it works at all). MY SUSPICION IS THAT ONE OF THE UPDATES e.g., KERNEL PATCH was at fault. I also found a similar issue with the latest thubleweed edition on this forum.

Before reinstalling, I’d to know if there is a method to revert to the last working system image without having to wipe and reinstall. I noticed that there were such options to load previous images on startup but they did not seem to do anything.

Also if this freezing is, as it seems, an update issue, anyone knows which one is to be avoided/tweaked and how?
Thanks a million.

8

Use BTRFS file system it take snapshots of the FS. The program is called snapper