Hello friends. I have a laptop here that I just did a fresh 12.3 install on with the Gnome desktop environment. I disabled (I didn’t delete, simply disabled) all 12.3 based repos and added TW via the one click installer. Then I did the rest of the steps in the documentation and rebooted. I can see kernel 3.10 in the advanced openSUSE boot list, so it looks like I got it, but when I boot up I get a black screen with green text. All I can see are the following:
Starting Accounts Service…
OK ] Started LSB: X Display Manager
OK ] Started Accounts Service
…and that’s it. It just sits here doing nothing otherwise.
Is there anything I can do? I was hoping I would get at least one usage out of a rolling distro before something broke.
Which 1-click install did you use exactly?
You should at least have the 12.3 (or openSUSE-current which points to 12.3 at this time) Oss and Update repo enabled, otherwise Tumbleweed won’t work.
Can you boot to recovery mode? (“Advanced Options” on the boot menu)
What graphics driver did you use? If it’s a proprietary one, you may have to reinstall it.
Or try to rename /etc/X11/xorg.conf, that should at least get you to the login screen.
Try to press ESC or Ctrl+Alt+F1 to get to a text mode login and run “zypper dup”.
Do you get any errors?
If you are in text mode, try to edit /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager and change the “DISPLAYMANAGER=…” line to:
DISPLAYMANAGER="xdm"
That should at least give you a graphical login screen.
If you are not able to login to GNOME there, try to choose IceWM to get a GUI.
For what it’s worth, I just spun up a 12.3 Gnome VM in Virtualbox. I repeated my same steps and it acted identically. Anybody with some spare time care to see if they can duplicate the same thing? I just want to make sure I’m not crazy…
I just followed that link and hit the exact same thing as before. Could it be something specific to the Gnome desktop with Tumbleweed? Is anybody running 12.3 Gnome that converted to Tumbleweed without any issues? The fact I had identical results on one physical machine and two virtual machines with two different guides is quite telling that there’s a massive bug out there, or else, I’m just a moron.
I then changed the priority of the Tumbleweed and Packman-Tumbleweed repos to 98, but left the “current” repos at 99. A “zypper dup” after that fixed the problems.
My main goal is to get on 3.10 as it fixes some issues I was having on my laptop. Thing is, I have a broadcom wireless card, so I’m not sure how I’d get on 3.10 and have my Wi-Fi card working. In my experience I had better luck with using whatever kernel came with the distro I’m on, which is what tumbleweed feels like it’s doing. If I can plug in 3.10 kernel to 12.3 with my broadcom wireless working, bump to gnome 3.8 (which I know I can do), then I’d be golden and wouldn’t care much about tumbleweed. Any insight on that?
I’ll also try the priority adjustment tomorrow and see if that does the trick. Thanks guys!
I’m getting feelings of ‘dejavu’ here. So this must be familiar for a reason.
As ugly as it might seem, given what I already know. I’d make a minimal investment in a wireless USB device to tide me over. I know I can buy one for under $10 and it’d save me a whole load of turding around. To me, this option is a whole lot easier than all the constant messing re-building your ‘wl’ module in a custom setup.
I appreciate the insight, but I cannot put into words how not enthused I am by requiring a USB adapter to be plugged in for network connectivity… Worse yet, Lenovo whitelists their wireless cards, so you can’t really swap them besides 1 or 2 other Lenovo-specific branded chips that they allow, otherwise I would have put an Intel in and been done with it. For a company that’s pretty awesome all around, that’s one of the worst show-stopping facepalms yet. What enrages me is from the standpoint of upgradability in the business world, not even ‘oh no I can’t change my wireless card that works with Linux better.’ For example, I work at a large public school district. Say we want to put SSDs and 802.11 AC chips in our Lenovos to lengthen the lifespan? Oh wait, you can’t, because Lenovo is Lenovo. /rant. That’s the only reason I needed to justify a System76 for the next purchase.
That said, if I were to run Tumbleweed I can see it being an issue, as TW would adopt whatever new kernel gets fired down the path. 3.11, 3.12, etc. That’s what Fedora did to me. 3.9.5 to 3.9.6 to 3.9.9, each one lost wireless. That said, Fedora is somewhat known to not play well with non-free stuff, so I’m hoping that was Fedora specific for the most part. On the flip side, if I could fire up 12.3, install 3.10 kernel, grab wireless drivers, Gnome 3.8, etc., AND see that future updates (3.10.1, 3.10.2, etc) don’t break wirele ss, we just might have a winner.
On the other hand, I still want to see if I can get this Tumbleweed thing figured out with the hangups at login. It’s strange, and suggests to me I either need to learn more about this process and what I did wrong or I need to get to reporting some bugs.
Basically if I put in an Intel wireless card, despite it fitting, the BIOS hardlocks on boot with an 1802 error, saying unsigned network card detected, please remove to continue. Lenovo has a check system to make sure that what wireless card you are putting in is exactly what they want to allow. Worse yet, I found a list of whitelisted cards for my Lenovo. There are 3. I bought an Intel chip 100% identical to the one listed in the description of acceptable cards. Unfortunately, this wireless card did not work. Why? It was an Intel that matched their description 100%. Ahh yes, but I bought an Intel wireless card, not an Intel wireless card FROM Lenovo. They must have some sort of signature upon boot to verify the chip.
I only have the one (TP model), and not sure there will be another. Nice package ootb. However, the kind of support one needs post the warranty period when components need replacing isn’t good enough (IMO), including their newish community support even wrt Windows.
Just to make sure I’m not doing something wrong, does anybody else out there have the time to spin up a 12.3 Gnome VM, port to Tumbleweed, and see if it works for you? I hate to escalate this if it’s a user error, but I also don’t want it to go unsaid if it’s something that needs to be reported.
