Installation of Radeon HD6450 graphics driver on OpenSuse 13.2

[hnimmo]

My installation of the graphics drivers from the ‘AMD/ATI graphics drivers’ community repository seems to have gone wrong and I now** cannot get a desktop environment running again.
**
The idea was install a Radeon Sapphire HD6450 graphics card on my dektop PC in order to get a bit more flexibility with two monitors. I added ‘AMD/ATI graphics drivers’ repository and installed what I thought seemed to be the drivers. After reboot, my system stops at the Linux host prompt and the Gnome desktop is not loaded.

I am running OpenSuse 13.2 (64-bit) with Gnome 3.14.2.

What can I do to recover my system? Any ideas?

Cheers
Harvey

[wolfi323]

@hnimmo

The idea was install a Radeon Sapphire HD6450 graphics card on my dektop PC in order to get a bit more flexibility with two monitors. I added ‘AMD/ATI graphics drivers’ repository and installed what I thought seemed to be the drivers. After reboot, my system stops at the Linux host prompt and the Gnome desktop is not loaded.

As you are using GNOME, you probably use gdm as well.
But gdm doesn’t seem to work at all with the fglrx driver at the moment.

You should use a different display manager (kdm or lightdm e.g.).

As a start, you could set DISPLAYMANAGER=“xdm” in /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager (you can edit that with a text editor, or use YaST->System->/etc/sysconfig editor), that should give you a graphical desktop at least.

[hnimmo]

@wolfi323

As you are using GNOME, you probably use gdm as well.
But gdm doesn’t seem to work at all with the fglrx driver at the moment.

You should use a different display manager (kdm or lightdm e.g.).

As a start, you could set DISPLAYMANAGER=“xdm” in /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager (you can edit that with a text editor, or use YaST->System->/etc/sysconfig editor), that should give you a graphical desktop at least.

Wolfi323, you hit the nail on the head! ‘xdm’ seems to work fine with gnome as well. Brilliant, many thanks!

Cheers

Harvey

[wolfi323]

@hnimmo

Wolfi323, you hit the nail on the head! ‘xdm’ seems to work fine with gnome as well. Brilliant, many thanks!

Well, you’re not the first one that had this problem…

I would suggest then to install lightdm and use that instead (I doubt that you’d want to pull in KDE packages on your GNOME system…), just set it in /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager as you did with xdm.
For now at least, until AMD (or GNOME?) manage to fix that issue.

[hnimmo]

@wolfi323

Well, you’re not the first one that had this problem…

I would suggest then to install lightdm and use that instead (I doubt that you’d want to pull in KDE packages on your GNOME system…), just set it in /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager as you did with xdm.
For now at least, until AMD (or GNOME?) manage to fix that issue.

You’re right, I do not want to use KDE. Gnome seems to work fine on xdm and I cannot tell the difference in behavour between xdm and lightdm.

Cheers
Harvey

[wolfi323]

@hnimmo

You’re right, I do not want to use KDE.

It’s not about using KDE.
The display manager is independent of the DE. You can use KDE with gdm, and GNOME with kdm, and any other combination.

But you’d have to install some other KDE packages to be able to install kdm.

Gnome seems to work fine on xdm and I cannot tell the difference in behavour between xdm and lightdm.

Well, xdm is rather basic.
lightdm looks nicer, is more convenient to use, and even has a GTK greeter. It’s the default in Ubuntu and Kubuntu (although they are switching to sddm now).
Have a look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LightDM

LightDM offers at least the same functionality as GDM but it has a simpler code base and does not load any GNOMElibraries to work

Anyway, if you’re satisfied with xdm, you can of course keep using this as well.