Has anyone successfully installed openSUSE 11.2 on a Dell PowerEdge 1850 system?
Undoubtedly, it wasn’t wise to attempt to upgrade from 10.2 to 11.2 but I was forced into it by a security audit of DMZ systems. It didn’t go as smoothly as the jump from 9.3 to 10.2.
I’ve spent the better part of a week getting an openSUSE 11.2 system installed. I went back to reiserfs and managed to get through and apply all the updates to openSUSE 11.2 today.
When I got to the final reboot, it failed when I attempted to log into the system. Basically, the keyboard and mouse became inoperable. The only way out of this situation is to mash the reset button.
Rebooting into safe-mode and adding level 3 to the safe mode boot options, I get to the point of starting sshd when the lock-up occurs.
It looks like X11 is the culprit. Booting a forensics DVD, I find that there is an xorg.conf.installation but no xorg.conf file.
The ATI Radeon VE chip set is used on the PowerEdge. From another openSUSE system that I haven’t upgraded, I see that X11 was configured for VESA mode. This is, probably, the mode that is needed as console access is, normally, through a KVM.
Can anyone provide a way to get past this problem with a workable keyboard and mouse?
The standard way to get a system to use the vesa driver is to:
- Put the system into run level 3,
- Login as root,
- Enter the command ‘sax2 -r -m 0=vesa’,
- Put the system into run level 5 or reboot.
You should then have GUI, keyboard and mouse.
Good luck.
Now, for the obligatory dumb question. How do I get to level 3 and get to a point where I can login?
When I booted into “safe mode”, I specified level 3. I never got to a point where I could log into either my account or root. The system “honked” when it tried to install sshd.
Some of us “Old Farts” have trouble remembering things that we did without thinking several years ago. rotfl!
just press 3 before booting normally.
If that does not work…did you check the install media?
Also an upgrade from 10.3 to 11.2 is really a huge leap. You should do a clean install particularly because you original moved from 9.3. There is certainly all kinds of junk laying around. If you are running in a commercial environment you really should use the Novel products they have much longer stable life times. OpenSuse is basically a test bed. It becomes non supported about ever 20 months
Actually, I was forced into a clean install of the system partition after encountering a problem with the default EXT3 file system.
It’s now configured as Reiser file system as is the /home partition.
Was able to boot to level 3 and login as root. Ran the “sax2 -r -m 0=VESA” command.
After initiating a reboot, I allowed the system to boot normally and display the login screen. At this point, several things can happen.
If I enter a login and password, the keyboard will lock and the mouse become inoperable after typing a half dozen or so characters in the password.
If I don’t enter anything and move the cursor down to the system and menu options in the lower left, the mouse and keyboard will become inoperable shortly after selecting either.
From another system on the same network, I can attempt to establish an ssh connection to the system or simply ping it. It will not respond.
“sax2 -r -m 0=VESA”
Why did you use vesa in uppercase? I am not sure if that is significant but it may not be able to find the associated driver in the X11 library. Try again with the way I specified it. Note that lower and upper case is significant in Linux, although not in Windows.
In the meantime I will try and think of any other reasons why the system should lock up.
I had a tablet with me that had two notes on it regarding the use of sax2. One was written with VESA and the other with vesa. I happened to pick the first note.
Haven’t been able to successfully boot to level 3. The following is reported on the display.
Starting smartd /etc/init.d/smartd line 190: 2842 killed $SMARTD_BIN$smartd_opts
After this is displayed the keyboard may or may not work.
Have you run some hardware diagnostics on it? Specifically on the RAM.
I ran complete memory diagnostics without any errors being reported.
At this point, I’ve abandoned all hope in getting the X11 environment to work. Even with using SaX2 to configure the Radeon VE graphics for VESA. One interesting aspect of the generated configuration file is a comment that the keyboard and mouse drivers will be disabled without modifying the ServiceFlags section.
With the location of the system in a DMZ, I have to enable X11 forwarding to use it and it doesn’t work all that well with the KVM that is normally connected to the system.
Level 3 works fine and works the same way an SSH connection would work when you forget to add the switches for X11 Forwarding.
I have noticed strangeness with the KVM switch I use. If a machine boots with that machine selected I loose the mouse when I switch to another machine then back. This appears to be either a KVM or BIOS issue since one machine runs OpenSuse 11.2 and the other still runs Win98 and both act essentially the same way.
What happens if you plug the keyboard and mouse direct to the machine?
Also have you tried modifying the ServiceFlags section with the suggested line?
As a temporary measure, I replaced the KVM connections with a physical monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Booting to level 5 resulted in the keyboard and mouse being disabled after typing into the password box or selecting the system or menu options at the bottom left of the screen.
The above occurred both before and after using SaX. I didn’t bother with adding the ServiceFlags option. I switched to using level 3. As the system is, primarily, an Apache server; I would be the only one who might access the system using X11. I can live with level 3.