installed dkms and virtualbox now only boot to init 3

English Install/Boot/Login
1

oh my, this is terrible. My system will only boot to run level 3 But… It takes 10 minutes. Then I can not get logged in, the login times out everytime after 60 seconds.
The system is 12.3

I suspect something to do with the install of DKMS package. I installed this yesterday per a suggestion from the Virtualbox install program. I then ran /etc/init.d vbox setup or something similar.
I can boot the 12.3 rescue CD with no problems and everything works there. I have checked the hard drives from the rescue and they all check out.

What should I do? It looks like I will have to work from the rescue CD. I have no idea where to start or what to do.
Hopefully someone has some time to give me some pointers.

2

As soon as I read “Virtualbox”, I stopped reading because I do not use it and thus have no knowledge.

But I thought we have a Virtualbox forum here, just to avoid that poor unknowing people like me stumble into Virtualbox problems. (And maybe Virtualbox users might get better help in the Virtalisation forum, but for the moment let me be selfish). :sarcastic:

3

Sorry if this is the wrong forum.
I think it has more to do with dkms than virtualbox but what do I know. I found a blog article from James that I think might be relevant. If I do not get any other ideas I am going to try that this afternoon.

4

You do not need dkms, but it speeds up installing Oracle VBox upgrades a bit. In the normal VBox installation process you should never have to run

“/etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup”.

If you have a 3.7.10 kernel you can now find VBox-4.2.8 in the repositories:
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Virtualization/openSUSE_12.3/
I you do this, you will have to remove the Oracle VirtualBox rpm first.

Instructions for installing VirtualBox-4.2.10 are at
https://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/virtualization/484122-please-help-problem-virtualbox.html#28

5

I use VirtualBox all the time and I don’t have dkms installed. If dkms is the problem, it is easy to remove it when are in runlevel 3 with zypper.

6

Anika,

Boot, go into the konsole and do:

su -c 'zypper rm dkms'

DKMS can be very handy. For example in a bumblebee situation, on the arrival of a new kernel, the bbswitch- and NVIDIA modules get rebuilt automagically. But my 2 cents are that you would have to set it up first for Vbox, haven’t used that for a while (no interesting windozes).

7

You can get dkms to work without bumblebee and with VirtualBox in openSUSE 12.2 and 12.3 if you use my bash script you can find here: DKMS & systemd - How to get Dynamic Kernel Module Support to work in openSUSE 12.1 - Blogs - openSUSE Forums DKMS, as installed from Packman, does not work properly with systemd, but my bash script creates the required systemd service file while abandoning the SystemV setup it defaults to using. If you have dkms installed and you upgrade your Linux kernel, dkms will recompile the VirtualBox driver and load it into the kernel automatically on first reboot with the new kernel version. And of course, since VirtualBox is looking to use dkms, loading dkms gets rid of the VirtualBox error that you see each time you manually force the driver to be recompiled.

Thank You,

8

Thanks for all the replies, after trying all the suggestions the situation was still the same and I ended up doing a new install and restoring all my data from backup.
The symptoms were quite bizarre, the system would take 15-20 minutes to boot to run level 3 and all commands used after that took forever to complete.

9

And after the reinstall, everything is back to normal?

Thank You,

10

Yes, everything is nice so far. I will be crossing my fingers when I install virtualbox tomorrow. :\ It must have been a fluke, otherwise someone else would be having problems.