Creating Automatic Configuration on UEFI systems

I am trying to install RC1 on an HP with UEFI boot. I have disabled Secure boot, and I have successfully installed Fedora 18 and Ubuntu 13.04 Beta. When I go through the openSuSE installation procedure it seems that I get everything right - the EFI Boot partition on this system is /dev/sda2, and I have openSuSE set up to mount that on /boot/efi without formatting it. The installation seems to complete normally, but when I reboot, and it should go into the “Creating Automatic Configuration…” screens, it just hangs. After a very long time it goes into “welcome to emergency mode” or some such, and I am basically out of luck at that point.

So, could someone please tell me…

  1. What would cause it not to get into the Automatic Configuration sequence? (it seems like it isn’t finding a console, or some such)

  2. How I can create a manual configuration, either before rebooting so that it doesn’t need/want/try the Automatic Configuration, or after Automatic Configuration has failed, so that I can recover from whatever mess it makes?

Thanks,

jw

On Sat, 09 Feb 2013 10:46:01 GMT
j a watson <j_a_watson@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:

> I am trying to install RC1 on an HP with UEFI boot.

I have installed RC1 on HP Pavilion P6-2021 but by selecting legacy
boot for the DVD or USB-stick and then installing GRUB2 on MBR alone.
No problems with installation process and openSUSE and Win-7 boot OK.


Graham P Davis, Bracknell, Berks.
openSUSE 12.3-RC1 (64-bit); KDE 4.10.00; AMD Phenom II X2 550 Processor;
Video: nVidia GeForce 210 (using nouveau driver);
Sound: ATI SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA); Wireless: BCM4306

Yes, thanks, I had found that after the previous posting - if I install with MBR boot, it then comes up ok. But the Network Manager doesn’t start. Any hints on that?

Thanks,

jw

On Sat, 09 Feb 2013 12:56:08 GMT
j a watson <j_a_watson@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:

>
> Yes, thanks, I had found that after the previous posting - if I
> install with MBR boot, it then comes up ok. But the Network Manager
> doesn’t start. Any hints on that?
>

I’ve asked for some myself! I’m sorry to say that, on my laptop, the
Network Manager just doesn’t appear in the systray. When I try editing
the wireless device in Network Communications I get a warning message
to say that I can’t do it and then it lets me do it. Aargh!


Graham P Davis, Bracknell, Berks.
openSUSE 12.3-RC1 (64-bit); KDE 4.10.00; AMD Phenom II X2 550 Processor;
Video: nVidia GeForce 210 (using nouveau driver);
Sound: ATI SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA); Wireless: BCM4306

On Sat, 09 Feb 2013 22:58:36 GMT
Graham P Davis <cloddy@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:

> On Sat, 09 Feb 2013 12:56:08 GMT
> j a watson <j_a_watson@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:
>
> >
> > Yes, thanks, I had found that after the previous posting - if I
> > install with MBR boot, it then comes up ok. But the Network Manager
> > doesn’t start. Any hints on that?
> >
>
> I’ve asked for some myself! I’m sorry to say that, on my laptop, the
> Network Manager just doesn’t appear in the systray. When I try editing
> the wireless device in Network Communications I get a warning message
> to say that I can’t do it and then it lets me do it. Aargh!
>

I’ve found that NM does appear in the systray for a newly-created
user. This looks like yet another occasion where a KDE update may have
screwed things up for the existing users. I hope there is a better
solution than renaming .kde4 and allowing a new one to be created -
I’ve a string of these already.


Graham P Davis, Bracknell, Berks.
openSUSE 12.3-RC1 (64-bit); KDE 4.10.00; AMD Phenom II X2 550 Processor;
Video: nVidia GeForce 210 (using nouveau driver);
Sound: ATI SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA); Wireless: BCM4306

On Sun, 10 Feb 2013 10:17:39 GMT
Graham P Davis <cloddy@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:

> On Sat, 09 Feb 2013 22:58:36 GMT
> Graham P Davis <cloddy@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:
>
> > On Sat, 09 Feb 2013 12:56:08 GMT
> > j a watson <j_a_watson@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > Yes, thanks, I had found that after the previous posting - if I
> > > install with MBR boot, it then comes up ok. But the Network
> > > Manager doesn’t start. Any hints on that?
> > >
> >
> > I’ve asked for some myself! I’m sorry to say that, on my laptop, the
> > Network Manager just doesn’t appear in the systray. When I try
> > editing the wireless device in Network Communications I get a
> > warning message to say that I can’t do it and then it lets me do
> > it. Aargh!
> >
>
> I’ve found that NM does appear in the systray for a newly-created
> user. This looks like yet another occasion where a KDE update may have
> screwed things up for the existing users. I hope there is a better
> solution than renaming ~/.kde4 and allowing a new one to be created -
> I’ve a string of these already.
>

Fixed most of the Network Manager problem by replacing
~/.kde4/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletsrc. I’d renamed ~/.kde4 so
that a new one was created and so verified that would provide the cure.
I then hunted through the files and thought the one above looked the
most promising, then swapped the folders but replaced the old file by
the newly-created one. Logging back on gave me the Network Manager in
the systray. I had to tinker with a few things on the task-bar -
location, size, pager settings - but it was fairly painless.

I dare say that simply renaming the above file and allowing it to be
recreated would have the same effect but I had to do it in stages to
work my way down to a possible solution.


Graham P Davis, Bracknell, Berks.
openSUSE 12.3-RC1 (64-bit); KDE 4.10.00; AMD Phenom II X2 550 Processor;
Video: nVidia GeForce 210 (using nouveau driver);
Sound: ATI SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA); Wireless: BCM4306

So login into emergency shell and post results of “journalctl -b” (or upload to susepaste.org if it is long). There is no way to guess what could happen without any information.

Continued testing and installation on a few other systems over the weekend has shown an easier solution to this situation. On several of the systems (but not all), Network Manager did not start on the first boot after installation completed. However, simply rebooting took care of it, Network Manager was then running, the icon was in the right place and doing the right things, and both wired and wireless networking have worked without problem since then.

To get back to the original subject of this thread, installing RC1 on an HP dm1-4310 with Windows 8 preloaded, gpt partition table and UEFI Secure Boot enabled. What I found was that if I install openSuSE and try the first boot after installation under any variation of UEFI boot (either by installing Grub2-efi with openSuSE, or using rEFInd, or via Grub from another Linux distribution, it does NOT succeed in running the “Create Automatic Configuration” process, and thus the installation is unusable as far as I know. However, if I install "“normal” Grub2, and I mark the Boot options during installation to boot from MBR, then I leave Legacy Boot support enabled in the BIOS and I boot the new openSuSE installation the first time via the MBR, the “Automatic Configuration” runs normally, and everything works. Once that first boot is complete, I can then disable Legacy Boot support in the BIOS, and boot openSuSE via rEFInd or another Linux installation’s Grub, and it works just fine. The next step will be to add grub2-efi to that installation, and then disable Legacy Boot support and do a normal UEFI boot on openSuSE, but I don’t expect that to be a problem now.

Thanks for all the help and suggetions above.

jw

Could it be related: Access Denied ?

What I found was that if I install openSuSE and try the first boot after installation under any variation of UEFI boot (either by installing Grub2-efi with openSuSE, or using rEFInd, or via Grub from another Linux distribution, it does NOT succeed in running the “Create Automatic Configuration” process, and thus the installation is unusable as far as I know.

I think this deserves bug report. It will never be fixed unless it is reported. And going via legacy BIOS boot installation is not really an option for more users (although it is made easier in 12.3).

Thanks, I will do that (file a bug report). I came here first because I have had trouble with the “Automatic Configuration” phase a number of times, so I assumed it was just something I was doing wrong, or that I didn’t understand. This seems not to be the case, however, so I will go ahead and file a bug report.

There is more good news on this. As I mentioned above, I went back to install grub2-efi and then configure UEFI boot on this system, and I found that although during the installation I had not chosen grub2-efi (as described above, I installed standard grub2 with MBR boot), it had in fact installed the necessary packages for grub2-efi. So all I had to do was mount the EFI boot partition (/dev/sda2 on my HP) as /boot/efi, and then use the grub2-install command to set up UEFI boot. For my HP dm1-4310 system, that command is:

grub2-install --efi-directory=/boot/efi --bootloader-id=opensuse

This did the trick! I can now boot via the default UEFI bootloader, or I can boot via rEFInd and openSuSE shows up in the list as a UEFI boot item. It all works very nicely.

jw

One more update on this subject. I ran through the installation again (on a UEFI system, Secure Boot disabled, and selected grub2-efi for the bootloader). As expected, on the first boot after installation it hangs, but after a minute or so it drops into emergency mode. At that point I checked ‘journalctl -b’ and found that it had failed to mount /boot/efi. I checked that it was properly configured in /etc/fstab (it was), and mounted it manually (mount /boot/efi), then tried to continue the initial boot by just logging out the emergency shell - still no joy, it just stays hung.

I have no other ideas about this, so I will just stay with the work-around I found (install with Legacy Boot enabled, choose MBR installation, reboot and let it do the Automatic Configuration, then set to mount /boot/efi and use grub2-mkconfig to set up UEFI boot).

Thanks for the help and suggestions.

jw

https://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/pre-release-beta/483228-opensuse-12-3-rc1-reboots-into-emergency-mode-right-after-installation.html

The advice in that thread fixed the problem, thanks very much. For those who do not want to have to dig through those threads, and try to figure out which of the several proposed solutions worked, I can say that in this case the solution was to remove the file remove /usr/lib/systemd/system/langset.service

In fact it can be done a bit more easily than is discussed in those other threads; knowing that this file is the problem, after the installation completes but before rebooting (i.e. while still running the Live image), you can start a shell, mount the target partition, remove that file and unmount the target partition, then reboot. The initial boot then runs allthe way through without problem.

Thanks very much.

jw

Hi,
I tried to install openSUSE 12.3 on a DELL XPS Generation 4, 64bits Dual processor, this is a NON EFI legacy machine.

The installation copies all the files and reboots and then hangs while creating automatic configuration.
The screen shows “Preparing system configuration 5%” and “Creating automatic configuration 18%.” at that point everything freezes.

Keep in mind that on the same machine I have other operating systems that work without any issue.
Windows 8 x64 is installed on one drive (intel Raid) and I have 2 other Linux systems on the second drive that work without any issue.
Linux MINT Mate and Linux MINT Cinnamon, all operating systems are 64bit versions.

I’m just new to openSUSE trying to replace one of the current Linux systems with openSUSE 12.3 to evaluate how it works, but no luck so far.

sda is a Intel RAID Volume with installed windows 8.

sdb
sdb1 94.3G NTFS
sdb2 5.9G SWAP
sdb3 24.4G ext4
sdb4 1k
sdb5 24.4G ext4 /

Installing openSUSE on sdb5 device, replacing a working Linux Mint system that worked with no problem.

After the openSUSE installation freezes I reboot and openSUSE starts, sends a message to the screen asking to complete the installation, but then it just gets back to the same problem.
I saw somebody else reporting a similar bug with openSUSE on the web, but I did not see any solution.
Any help will be appreciated.
Thanks
F.G.

Switch to tty2 and check which processes are running at this point (ps -ef). Would be helpful to post list here. Also output of “systemctl list-jobs”.

How do I switch to tty2 ? The system is not responding at that point .

I found a workaround that let the installation complete without hangs, but it doesn’t look like a clean solution.
Instead of using grub2 in the openSUSE installation I selected “Do not install any boot loader” and I used the boot loader from my other Linux system. Once the installation of openSUSE was ready to reboot, I booted my Linux Mint and issued “sudo update-grub2” which added the openSUSE to the boot list, at this point I could boot openSUSE and it completed the “prepearing system configuration” and “creating system configuration” without hanging. The network manager at this point was not started. I rebooted again and openSUSE came up fine this time.
It looks to me that there are different variations of this problem which are also affecting NON EFI legacy systems depending on how many different operating systems are installed on the same machine.
F.G.

The only difference I can think of is kernel boot parameters. It would be interesting to compare them between original installation and current case.

Did you install bootloader after that? Can you boot using “native” openSUSE bootloader?

After that I tried again an installation trying to use the openSUSE bootloader, but I eneded up hanging again and eventually it messed up my raid devices where I have windows 8. I had to restore windows 8 from my backup and then I gave up trying to install openSUSE again, I tried several times with no success, so I installed back my second Linux Mint system without any problem.
Looks like openSUSE cannot handle the configuration of my system even if it is a legacy NON EFI box. It has an Intel ICH6R Raid controller.
My windows 8 system is on the raid device, my Linux systems are on the second drive wich is standard non raid.
I could try again but I don’t want to destroy my windows system again. Can openSUSE handle the Raid drives ?
F.G.

Ok I gave it yet another try and this time the autoconfiguration completed without hanging, it rebooted and I opened the network, it was showing network manager not running , please start network manager, the enable networking was unchecked.
I check “enable networking” and restarted, tried to get to the web with Mozilla and connected with no problems.

Here is what I did this time:

  1. During installation I replied yes when it asked about managing the RAID compatible partitions.
  2. Selected GRUB2
  3. When it asked where to put the boot loader I selected custom boot on sdb5.

It loaded all files from the DVD and rebooted, selected linux from the windows boot manager, and after starting grub2 it showed up the openSUSE boot manager with 3 possible choice a) openSUSE, a) Windows loader, c) Linux Mint 14.
Pressed enter for openSUSE and the system came up went through the configuration with no problems.

sdb
sdb1 94.3G NTFS
sdb2 5.9G SWAP
sdb3 24.4G ext4
sdb4 1k
sdb5 24.4G ext4 / (selected custom boot on this device where openSUSE was installed.

At this point I’m not sure what exactly was causing the hang on all previous attempts. I would have to try again leaving all the defaults to see which combination is screwing up the autoconfiguration phase.
I’m still unclear if managing the RAID configuration is a problem or not. But when I tried to leave the default booting on MBR of the raid it was always hanging.
Another variation in this last attempt that worked was that I used the DVD instead of the USB memory stick prepared with the Image Writer, not sure if that makes any difference.
I may try a few more times to isolate more precisely what is causing the hang.
Thanks,
F.G.