Installing 15.5: disaster

Curious abut the new version 15.5, I upgraded my laptop from 15.4 from a bootable usb-drive with the 15.5 xf-86 DVD iso image.

  • Installation process (upgrade) seemed flawless. However, after rebooting the system, no Plasma (X11), Gnome or ICEwm did start.
    Instead, a terminal was opened top left of the screen. No window manager.

  • When, from the mentioned terminal application I logged in as root, and the did ‘startx’, the Plasma desktop does start-up.

  • For a normal user, startx just gives a black screen, but with the mouse pointer active!

  • Instead of an upgrade, I tried a new, fresh install.
    The same useless result.

As a bonus, after several boot attempts, I now get a “verifying shim sbat data failed” message. I now have to disable the secure boot.

Back to 15.4 …

That happens to me after install with the DVD.

It happens because I use “csh” as my shell, but “csh” (really “tcsh”) is not on the install DVD. So the normal desktop startup fails because of the lack of a shell, so there is a fallback to using “twm” for one window.

When that happens, I use “chsh” to change my shell to bash. I then logout and login again and all is fine. When I have installed “tcsh”, I can revert to my preferred shell.

I don’t know whether that is your specific problem, but perhaps it will at least give you a hint as to what might be wrong.

At a guess, you didn’t precisely follow the upgrade instructions: <https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:System_upgrade>.

  • You can either, try again to perform the upgrade or, you can carefully use “mokutil” to get the SHIM certificates in place …
    Please be aware that, the “Blue Screen” MokUtil uses when you reboot, expects a US-ASCII Keyboard –
    Set the password MokUtil uses to something very simple «like 6 digits» – don’t worry about security – you’re the only one sitting at the keyboard when the system begins booting (after the Mainboard splash and before the openSUSE “choices” splash) …

  • Yo may also have to get into the certificates managed by your Mainboard to resolve this issue – the MOK certificates are usually not visible from the Mainboard’s UEFI/BIOS.

It is more likely that he is seeing Bug 1209985

Yes, except OP did not provide any information allowing us to guess what happened. But booting Leap 15.4 ISO after Leap 15.5 would certainly trigger this problem.

Yes, I agree. (Plus some noise to satisfy the forum software requirements).