I have a 32 bit OpenSUSE Tumbleweed (v13x) machine that I can’t login on any account. The machine boots up normally but when I attempt to login the green screen goes blank after a few seconds and there is no apparent way of getting out, so I have to crash the machine to shutdown. The machine is setup to use KDE. So here are some symptoms:
My monitor complains about the scan rate of the signal it receives when I boot. It’s a Dell 23" that capable up to 1920x1080 @ 60hz. This has been a problem from day one and it prevents me from seeing the boot options. A few seconds later the display syncs to it’s highest resolution.
When I connect another less capable monitor, I can see the boot options but I still can’t login to any account with the same problem noted earlier.
When I login using the recovery mode the machine boots normally and I can login to any account but it seems like the machine might be using another window manager although I see a K in the taskbar.
As I mention in the title, this problem came about after a tumbleweed update. This was probably introduced about a month ago when I last used the machine. I’ve never used recovery mode and to put it plainly, I really have no idea how to go about fixing this beast. I suspect that it might have something to do with screen resolution but I’m not sure how to potentially test it. I have no backup where the machine’s purpose is for testing and otherwise to get more familiar with SUSE. I’ve been around RH and pure unix distros for years though.
What does “OpenSUSE Tumbleweed (v13x)” mean?
You are either using openSUSE 13.x or openSUSE Tumbleweed.
I suppose it’s the latter…
As I mention in the title, this problem came about after a tumbleweed update. This was probably introduced about a month ago when I last used the machine.
Well, how exactly did/do you install updates?
There were a few users (that use YaST to install the updates) with vaguely similar problems a while ago.
Check that you have “kwayland” installed, it should have replaced the older libKWaylandServer and libKWaylandClient (the packaging was changed about a month ago).
If you still have the latter two installed, that explains your problems and the apparently not-working kwin.
Installing “kwayland” manually should fix it.
Or run “zypper dup”.
In fact it is Tumbleweed. I was unaware that Tumbleweed could cross major versions, so I added the 13.x reference.
Well, I didn’t. One thing I didn’t mention at first is that gnome is also installed and works just fine. But I did the full zypper dup (within gnome) and after a couple of hours I rebooted the machine and NOTHING IMPROVED. KDE was still broke and KDE failsafe didn’t work either. I also noticed that snapper had pushed disk space usage up to 99% so I did some cleaning.
It had become clear that I wasn’t getting any where fast, and I really couldn’t trust the environment anyway due to what snapper did, so I decided to do a fresh install. I downloaded 32 bit Tumbleweed with the 20151002 freeze date and burned it. So I cleared the drive partition and did a complete fresh install with nothing unusual selected. So guess what… After the reboot, KDE was broken just like before. I did a couple of other reinstalls both with and without external repos selected and snapper disabled with NO DIFFERENCE! Clearly 32 bit Tumbleweed has some problems, at least on my machine. But gnome has some problems after the reinstall too; it eventually comes up after displaying a systemd-logind error.
So to make my life easier, I did a fresh install of 13.2 this morning and KDE is fine. Loaded the gnome pattern and this environment works fine too. So it’s pretty clear that Tumbleweed isn’t as stable as advertised.
Tumbleweed is a completely separate distribution, totally unrelated to openSUSE 13.x.
Well, I didn't. One thing I didn't mention at first is that gnome is also installed and works just fine. But I did the full zypper dup (within gnome) and after a couple of hours I rebooted the machine and NOTHING IMPROVED. KDE was still broke and KDE failsafe didn't work either.
Well, this was just a first guess because other people had exactly that problem a few weeks ago.
It had become clear that I wasn’t getting any where fast, and I really couldn’t trust the environment anyway due to what snapper did, so I decided to do a fresh install. I downloaded 32 bit Tumbleweed with the 20151002 freeze date and burned it. So I cleared the drive partition and did a complete fresh install with nothing unusual selected. So guess what… After the reboot, KDE was broken just like before. I did a couple of other reinstalls both with and without external repos selected and snapper disabled with NO DIFFERENCE! Clearly 32 bit Tumbleweed has some problems, at least on my machine. But gnome has some problems after the reinstall too; it eventually comes up after displaying a systemd-logind error.
I’m installing the 32bit all the time in VirtualBox, the last one 20151002 yesterday (I can only use 32bit guests because my CPU doesn’t support hardware virtualization), and never had such problems. In fact Plasma5 is running fine here.
Probably there are some problems with your particular hardware, the graphics card in particular.
So to make my life easier, I did a fresh install of 13.2 this morning and KDE is fine. Loaded the gnome pattern and this environment works fine too. So it’s pretty clear that Tumbleweed isn’t as stable as advertised.
Yes, it is quite stable.
But it is a rolling distribution, things can go wrong because of the constant changes.
And as always, different hardware might yield different results, certain hardware might cause problems because of bugs in the drivers (or no driver available at all).
I had a problem after login in KDE on Tumbleweed: I have a dual monitors setting and after some update when I log in KDE the screen goes black, or green or blue with nothing displayed and I can only quit by killing the session.
I have found that KDE save some setting in ~/.local/share/kscreen, the files therein contain something which like a concatenate of the Xorg.conf.d. files.
When I have a problem I remove all files in ~/.local/share/kscreen and after that I can again login in KDE.
Not sure that your problem is the same but you can try it.
They are certainly different distros but they appear to be using the same code base. Not a surprise; actually it would be somewhat foolish not to. I found a number of 13.2 tags within the Tumbleweed install software.
Well, that’s certainly possible but I’m somewhat taken back that the modules in 13.2 work fine and Tumbleweed doesn’t. I’m wondering if I can expect a problem in the near future when the 13.2 module catches up with Tumbleweed. Hopefully the developers keep an eye on this forum.
This is sounding like Fedora all over again… I shouldn’t be surprised. At least in the RH word there is CentOS that has identical stability as the parent. (it’s on another machine)
Well 13.2 will never catch tumble weed but there is a new version coming call 42.1 ( I have not seen a rational for the name convention change. I feel a marketing droid has slipped in ) This version is to be synced with SUSE SLE versions.
With Tumbleweed you get a new OS each week or so, it is in constant change. This is fine if you like playing with OS’s but I’d not use it for mission critical stuff. Stick to the numbered versions if you wish stability. Note that Tumbleweed is stable compared to factory lol!
) This version is to be synced with SUSE SLE versions.