Installation woes revisited

Thanks to all the kind members of this forum who have responded to my previous postings on my openSuse 11.0 installation woes. I now find something very strange going on and wonder if someone can offer an explanation. I bought a boxed copy of Suse 10.0 and installed it on a standalone PC and found it to be very reliable and stable, even if that PC had no Internet connection. Next I obtained the openSuse 11.0 DVD that came with the September 2008 issue of Linux Format magazine. I ran the Live mode version of openSuse 11.0 and was so impressed with its speed and stability that I decided to install it to my hard drive and that is when the trouble started.

The PC in question is part of a network of 3 machines running Windows 98, Windows NT4 and Windows XP Pro, with XP running on the machine to which I want to install openSuse 11.0. I backed up all my Windows data files to both an external hard drive and DVD, booted the openSuse 11.0 DVD in live mode, and from the KDE 4.04 desktop chose the Install application. All went well and very quickly and in short order I had a fully functional openSuse 11.0 with just myself as the one user, apart from the root account of course. I began using openSuse from my regular user account and quickly noticed that there were 2 problems:

  1. From the Grub menu at boot it was not possible to select Windows XP as the operating system. I need to run some Windows and DOS legacy applications and have not yet learned how to run dosemu under Linux. In threads here I learned that I needed to modify the rootnoverify and chainloader command parameters of the menu.lst file, but despite changing the parameters from (hd0, 5) to (hd0, 0), I still cannot get Windows XP to boot. Do I need to add a boot command after the chainloader command in menu.lst for the Windows section?

  2. When running openSuse 11.0 as a standard user I suddenly lost my keyboard functions altogether. I did not edit any files other than menu.lst, and had not been running openSuse as root. Various suggestions here said that I should reconfigure things using Yast2/Sax2, but that did not help things at all. I tried to run openSuse 11.0 at runlevel3 and then found something really odd. At runlevel 3 in command line mode my keyboard works fine (so it is not a hardware problem); if I then login as root and issue the command startx, the X server begins normally and KDE 4.04 runs perfectly with my keyboard working properly.

However if from runlevel 3 I login as my usual self and issue the command startx, then from KDE 4.04 I have a perfect GUI but a totally dead keyboard. Someone suggested that I should edit etc/X11/xorg.conf using xorgconfig. I tried this but it kept giving me errors saying that I had not entered correct values for the Vertical synch frequency of my monitor, when I had!

My question is this. Surely the standard openSuse 11.0 setup with KDE 4.04 will use the same xorg.conf file regardless of whether I am logged in as root or as a regular user. Why then does my keyboard work fine when I login as root but die when I login as a normal user or run in live mode (as I am doing now)?

Any further suggestions please? (Bearing in mind that I am relatively new to this beast called Linux…)

If this is a relatively new install - would it be so much of a pain to re-install? Just keep your /home partition as is (do not format) during the install.

I suspect a driver issue. I would possibly try rolling back all my packages to dvd install versions - though it is a little tricky to do. Just to see if that works.

On the other hand - have you tried kde3? or thought of upgrading to kde4.1?

> My question is this. Surely the standard openSuse 11.0 setup with KDE
> 4.04

it seems apparent that you cannot ‘hack’ your way though to happiness with
KDE4.04, so i quote “mingus725” who wrote the following (much better than i
could ever) on 13 Aug 2008:

“KDE 4 is still very young. It is recommended only for experienced users who can
hack their way around problems. If you have not upgraded from the installed 4.0
to 4.1, you can try that; 4.1 is much better. But still, it is undergoing active
development and at times things don’t work right. You would just have to see.
The better bet would be to install KDE 3.5.9; you can do that and leave KDE 4.1
installed, too. KDE 3.5.9 is very mature and stable. You could then use 3.5.9 as
your primary gui, and occasionally update your 4.1 and check it out; when your
4.1 is stable, you can switch to it as your primary. Many very experienced
openSUSE users are sticking with 3.5.9 until 4.x has had time to mature.”


DenverD (Linux Counter 282315) via NNTP crafted by Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 in KDE
3.5.7 under SUSE Linux 10.3 2.6.22.18-0.2-default #1 SMP i686 athlon

caf4926 wrote:

>
> If this is a relatively new install - would it be so much of a pain to
> re-install? Just keep your /home partition as is (do not format) during
> the install.
>
> I suspect a driver issue. I would possibly try rolling back all my
> packages to dvd install versions - though it is a little tricky to do.
> Just to see if that works.
>
> On the other hand - have you tried kde3? or thought of upgrading to
> kde4.1?
>
>
Hello,

Sometimes creating a new user will also help.

Regards,

Frans Leerink

Thank you Frans, this simple suggestion has temporarily solved my problem with the dead keyboard. Since other postings here suggest that I am not alone in having this problem, perhaps the openSuse developers should take a look at this issue and work out why it is happening and fix it. As it stands openSuse 11.0 is not going to convert the vast majority of Windoze users to a better (faster and more stable) OS.