I have been using Mepis (KDE) for years but decided to try OpenSUSE 11.1 with KDE 4.1. It installed but would not boot up. I tried repairing the grub boot loader with no success. Then I tried an install with KDE 3.5 - still would not boot up. Then I tried an install with Gnome & it booted up just fine! Unfortunately I prefer KDE.
probably need some additional behavior information to diagnose. does it try to load at all?
does it reach a login and thats when an issue starts trying to open a kde session(seems more likely from what you describe) and any error messages on startup may prove useful too
There are no error messages. Just the green OpenSUSE splash screen, then it goes to a blank screen.
i’m going to make a suggestion based on the idea that you have auto login enabled, not sure if it will help but its the best i have without my machine for reference(sucks being at work^_^)
if you haven’t already you could try to recompile the kde-workspace package. but beyond that it could take a very close look at the packages that installed for it(the same symptoms occured on my laptop but a recompile of the above rpm corrected it and allowed it to boot immediately)
i wish you luck and i will stop by and see what other help i can offer if any^_^
It does not make a difference whether the auto login is enables or not. I also tried to install from a live CD with the same results.
actually it does matter. if auto login is enabled it automatically tries to start something that obviously isn’t work where as if its disable and requires a login entry the option to log in via CLI becomes available allowing both the use of yast an other command lines that can aid in diagnosing the problem and there fore correcting it. no installation or media is inherintly perfect so reinstalling from the same media if it has an issue(however small that might be) will yield the same results time and again. all of these things can and do happen from time to time.
i am merely trying to gain a greater understanding of the system behavior so that this issue can hopefully be resolved
I meant that I get the same results (blank screen) when autologin is enabled or disabled; not that it doesn’t matter.
Thanks for your help.
Do you have a KDE installation now that has the problem. If “yes” then can you boot into it or is the first green Grub menu screen as far as you can go?
@swerdna i think i’m getting what he’s saying now, it makes it to the splash screen right before it goes black so its something between grub and login
have you switched the green splash screen to verbose by hitting esc? might yield some clues;)
Yes it is the first green splash screen where the system hangs up. I forgot about the verbose mode. It is hard to read those lines because they fly by so fast! It goes through most of the boot up then the screen goes blank after “setting up services localfs network” (at least I think it is localfs)
@entreatos looks like you’re right and it’s after the fragment quoted by diver63.
The fragment might be:
Setting up (localfs) network interfaces:
@diver63: You can retrieve the file boot.msg located at /var/log/boot.msg and look for that line and scrutinise what comes after it to see if there’s a message about a problem or when it stops or whatever.
If you can’t boot to it then you can retrieve it by mounting the root partition into an external Live Linux like Knoppix or openSUSE 11.1 Live or the 11.1 installation DVD (in “Rescue System” mode) etc, and copy it to a usb stick.
now i do believe we are getting somewhere^_^
i know the verbose zips by pretty quick but logically it the next process that is causing the hang up, so try booting for gnome and watch for that entry… make note of the entry following it, or if you have gnome set up to make a bootlog you can use that to post here and maybe we get lucky and find the offending service^_^
Thanks guys. Sorry it takes me so long to respond between messages but I have a lot of other things to do.
I accessed the boot.msg file thru a live CD so I can’t copy & paste it here, but the last 3 lines are
Master Resource Control: runlevel5 has been reached
Skipped Services in runlevel5: acpid nfs
<notice>Killproc: Kill(1738.3)
I’ll step out of discussion of the boot.msg file. Defer to others.
unless i’m completely off the mark the problem lies with one(or both) of the killed processes although i don’t recognize the id’s of either. best guess is that one of those is the PID for kde-workspace. if you can use gnome to identify the processes(or the gnome equivalant) there still may be a fix
In the /boot/grub/menu.lst file I added acpi=force and now KDE will boot up.
Thanks for your help.
One reason I am looking to change from Mepis is that under Mepis you have to do a fresh install rather than an upgrade for each new version because changes since the last install are lost if you try an upgrade. Do you know if Opensuse keeps all configuration changes etc. when upgrading to a new release?
Well done – I would have been flummoxed.