Okay I did a clean network install on 11.2 on my test machine. Old gateway box but it had min requirements. It will load completely into failsafe mode but will not complete a normal boot option. The default Green background images comes up and the cursor comes up, but I let it sit for 30 minutes and nothing. I did a hard reboot, still hung on cursor and green back ground. Booted again but this time choose failsafe, boot up completely. Am I doing something wrong? I have installed many many version of Linux in the past never had a problem like. Any help??
Two possibilities. … possibly your old PC does not have enough ram ?
Did you try a text install ? Guidance here: Text mode install from liveCD - openSUSE Forums … I confess to being confused by your post. Do you mean a failsafe boot brings you to your desktop ok ?
Another possibility is your graphics were not configured properly. There is some practical theory guidance here: openSUSE Graphic Card Practical Theory Guide for Users - openSUSE Forums
… perhaps, if the above does not help, you could tell us more about your hardware? CPU ? RAM ? Graphics ?
Yes, if i boot into failsafe mode the desktop comes up fine. The system is old but it meets the min requirements as stated in the documentation. Its an older Gateway system. Celeron Processor, 512MB ram, 40gb hard drive. It ran Windows XP decently so I dont see why Linux wouldn’t run. I did the install again after adding another hard drive. Once it gets past the autologin screen the taskbar came up for a few seconds and then went away. The cursor is there and I can move it around, but nothing else.
It could be the graphical driver is not configured properly. What can you tell us about your graphic hardware?
Its an older Intel chipset. Built-in video card. Not sure of the exact model number unfortunately. I assumed that if the OS didnt like the graphics card that the graphic would show distorted, is this not true with Linux?
No…
Type lspci at a command line to get a list of PCI devices. This should list the video chip.
read openSUSE Graphic Card Practical Theory Guide for Users - openSUSE Forums
you may need to specify the vesa driver for this old chip.
Old Intel ? That may be important. There are major problems with the Intel 8xx chipset in some older PCs. Please note this thread:
- Intel 855GM graphics problems w/openSUSE-11.2s 2.6.31 kernel - openSUSE Forums
- Intel GPU 8xx issues, will 11.3 have them too?! - openSUSE Forums
If you download and try openSUSE-11.1, you may find it works better than openSUSE-11.2 or 11.3 milestone on an older Intel graphics PC. Its 2.6.27 kernel did not have the problem the newer kernels have. Download the liveCD (it should hopefully run with 512MB of RAM) and see how it works.
There is also an unofficial Ubuntu liveCD for testing (put together by the Ubuntu community) which has a possible fix for the 8xx GM graphics. I am one of the people seeding it via torrent in the hope that its fix works. If so then let us know as we are trying to understand for whom the fix works. You could try it. Link is here: Live-CD of Ubuntu 10.04 with updated Intel-drivers and 855gm-patched kernel-modules « Glasens Blog If this fix proves sufficiently successful, ultimately the fix will be sent upstream to the kernel, and then sent back down stream so that all Linux distributions, including openSUSE, will benefit.
Thanks oldpc, I’ll check it out. Hopefully I can get it to work.
IMHO this is good advice. As noted, the older Intel hardware may not work with the default Intel driver, as I inferred/advised in my above post.
Okay I ran lspci and my card is a Intel 82845G/GL. I’m going to dig through the guide and see if i can fix this thing tonight.