Hello all, I was wondering if anyone could help me solve this problem.
For the past several months, my Linux partition has been sorely neglected as I’ve needed Adobe Photoshop extensively for my classes, and so I’ve been spending pretty much all my time in Windows. Now that classes are over, I thought it was about time I go back over to Linux, and as a result I had a whole bunch of updates waiting for me. So I fired up Apper and let them run in the background, figuring it would take some time for everything to install.
After a while, I checked up to see how things were going. Gave my approval to update Adobe Flash, and that’s when things got a bit weird…it seemed to stop all the other updates once I gave my approval for that. So, I tried to run the updates again, and it snagged in the same spot - after I approved updating Flash, it looked as though it just ‘finished’ everything else - nothing crashed or displayed any errors or other things out of the ordinary, but the list of updates to install hadn’t changed. I thought rebooting might solve the problem, and I’d come back and try updating again.
When I rebooted, it gave me the message “could not start kdeinit4. Check your installation.” I googled the error a bit, but didn’t find anything too concrete about it, except that chances are during the update process something either broke or got deleted…one suggestion I saw was to delete the .kde folder from the home directory, so I ran midnight commander and did that, but no dice. I also thought I could try installing another DE since it seemed like a KDE-specific problem, and hoped I might be able to fix things from there, but it seems like the command line wasn’t able to connect to my wifi (our router is the landlady’s and upstairs from my apartment, so I can’t use ethernet or anything). The last few times I’d booted, I had to turn my wlan switch off and then back on for KDE to detect my network, but I’m not really sure how to force the command line to see it…so unless I figure out how to do that, I can’t install any new packages that way, either.
Anyone have an idea of what I could do to fix this? I’m not terribly well-versed in using the command line, so if you could dumb things down when explaining, that would be a big help. Thanks.
Yes, I’m using OpenSUSE 12.1. When I boot, I don’t get taken to the login screen, as it auto-boots me into KDE by default (I believe this is the default setting that I didn’t change during install). What command could I use to start icewm directly from the command line? I would have to boot to check my additional repos, but I do have a few unstable packages installed (like GIMP 2.8), and I know I’m subscribed to unofficial repositories for those programs.
sigh I feel like a huge idiot right now. I think I made things worse by being naive.
Booted level 3, ran yast, edited my user account to disable autologin. All that was fine. But when I was accessing my user account, I went straight down to the autologin check box, ignoring the other fields like my username and password - assuming that if untouched, they would remain as default. Apparently not. When it booted again I was taken to a command line (it still didn’t bring me to a graphical login screen where I could have selected different WMs), and tried to login again. Apparently my password is now incorrect, and of course that means I can’t go in and edit my user account and change it again…it didn’t seem to reset the password to blank or ‘root’, either.
Have I screwed up to the point where I should just reinstall? I feel like an idiot for letting this happen.
On Tue, 05 Jun 2012 16:36:02 +0000, SG2Tiger wrote:
> When it booted again I was taken to a command
> line (it still didn’t bring me to a graphical login screen where I could
> have selected different WMs), and tried to login again. Apparently my
> password is now incorrect, and of course that means I can’t go in and
edit
> my user account and change it again…it didn’t seem to reset the
password
> to blank or ‘root’, either.
>
> Have I screwed up to the point where I should just reinstall? I feel
like
> an idiot for letting this happen.
No need to reinstall to reset the password (not sure about the other
issues, but probably no need to reinstall on those either).
Login as root at the console and type:
passwd <username>
(replace <username> with the name of your user)
You’ll be able to change the password.
If you cannot login as root for some reason, boot the system up and in
the grub menu, add:
init=/bin/bash
That should boot you straight to a shell where you can reset both
passwords.
Thank you, that solved my password problem. However, even after disabling auto-login, it still pushes me to the command line after I boot, instead of a graphical login screen. I tried running startx as root, and it just bumped me right back to the ‘could not start kdeinit4’ message. I’m not getting the login screen where I could select a different window manager to run. Is there a way to launch icewm directly from the command line, or something else I could do to fix the kdeinit4 problem?
…12.2 beta…? I’m not sure how this happened…but could that explain things getting broken after trying to install updates? I certainly didn’t manually install a 12.2 beta.
Ok sounds like a video driver problem maybe what video do you have? You using a proprietary driver? Maybe needs reinstalled.
Try starting in safe mode select from the boot screen
Your problem with flash may have been that you have to accept their ULA and maybe that may have appeared behind another window and blocked the process.
> [image: http://i.imgur.com/JBAfY.jpg]
>
> …12.2 beta…? I’m not sure how this happened…but could that
> explain things getting broken after trying to install updates? I
> certainly didn’t manually install a 12.2 beta.
Yes indeed, this could explain it.
You probably have activated some of the 12.2 repos. Do a “zypper lr
–details” and post the list here. If it doesn’t fit in a screen, dump it
to a file:
"zypper lr --details" > somenewfile
Then you can post the file here or in susepaste. If you post here use codetags:
I’ve never had video problems before and I’ve used Windows and Linux on this machine for about 3 years. I have an Intel 4 series video card. I actually did accept the Flash ULA, but when I hit allow, it stopped the update process. It did this twice. That’s when I rebooted my machine, hoping I could come back and try running updates again.
I found https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=106064 as a possible solution to the kdeinit4 problem, not sure if I should try this? If I did, what would I do, edit this file with vi I’m assuming? What does ‘break the line’ mean? I’m not experienced enough using the command line to think I should attempt these things without making sure I know what I’m doing.
Sorry, hadn’t noticed this post right away because I was refreshing page 1 of the thread. I’ve done this, and here are my results. SusePaste tells me I’m a spammer, so here’s a Pastebin link.
> Sorry, hadn’t noticed this post right away because I was refreshing
> page 1 of the thread. I’ve done this, and here are my results. SusePaste
> tells me I’m a spammer, so here’s a Pastebin link.
>
> ‘# | Alias | Name | Enabled | Refresh - Pastebin.com’
> (http://pastebin.com/q2NQGVeP)
You have several repos labeled factory, those are the culprits.
You have such a long list of repos that I don’t know where to start. I
would recommend to remove all repos except oss, non-oss, and updates (of
12.1), then do a zypper dup. This will revert your installation to a plain
12.1 without frizzles. Reboot.
If it works, then add only the repos that you strictly need, no more.
Finally, remove apper from your system, and be careful with the updates you do.
Also, make sure you do not have duplicate repos.
Hint: yast works in text mode too. If it fails, use zypper.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)
When you say it will revert my installation, do you just mean as far as installed programs and libraries are concerned? Or will it also roll back my files, themes, etc?
> When you say it will revert my installation, do you just mean as far as
> installed programs and libraries are concerned? Or will it also roll
> back my files, themes, etc?
Personal files and configurations will remain intact. It may affect
programs of which you had a newer version and features will be missing. But
this is temporary, after your system is working you can start updating
things slowly and carefully, like to kde 48.
It is the only assured way I can think of reverting the damage caused by an
incomplete update to factory.
On the other hand, you can also update everything to factory or tumbleweed,
if you like living on the edge. Factory is in turmoil right now, many
things do not work right at the moment. It is up to you - if you use
factory you should be able to solve problems like this on your own.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)
I went through and removed all my repositories except oss, non-oss, and update, but I can’t actually run zypper dup without an internet connection. As I mentioned, I can’t use ethernet and my only internet connection is wifi, but I’m not sure how to connect to wifi via the command line. I tried following How to Connect Wifi Using Command Line on Ubuntu/Backtrack | Caleudum but assuming ‘key’ means my WEP key and s:password means my root password…it didn’t work. I can’t seem to find a useful step-by-step for connecting to wifi from the command line. Any advice?
Booting still takes me directly to a command prompt instead of the graphical login screen, even after I’ve disabled auto-login. I’m not sure how to get into IceWM.
