Over the weekend I updated my distribution from 12.3 to Leap 42.1. Unlike previous upgrades, there were tons of issues. Notably X crashed on startup. I removed the graphics driver and managed to get into KDE, which I was using for a few versions. Only it crashed ALL the time! Silly things like resizing windows would make the window disappear and it kept opening windows that crossed screen boundaries.
So I got rid of KDE, I removed all packages with KDE in the name and installed XFCE instead. The system is now working and has not crashed since. There are features which I lost in the process and I haven’t figured out how to get them back:
Autologin: I have the parameter set in gconf and in User Management from Yast2 but it always prompts me for a user id and password from a grey screen which says OpenSUSE.
Logout: It does not go to the same screen as before which had user names and a setting icon to choose among window manager. Now, it’s just a grey screen with entry-field for user-name and password.
Splash-screen: Actually not sure what it’s called but it’s gone. It used to show the green Leap logo (diamond shape) during boot but now there are 3 question marks flashing.
Any idea which package and/or settings are needed to restore this? (Without getting back to something that crashed all the time)
What graphics card are you using, and what driver did you remove?
If it’s nvidia, then yes, you should always remove the driver before doing the upgrade and install it from scratch afterwards.
Maybe post /var/log/Xorg.0.log to see what driver you are actually using now.
Autologin: I have the parameter set in gconf and in User Management from Yast2 but it always prompts me for a user id and password from a grey screen which says OpenSUSE.
You probably use xdm, which doesn’t support Autologin.
Install and configure a different displaymanager (DISPLAYMANAGER= in /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager), e.g. gdm, lightdm, kdm, sddm, …
Apparently you also removed the used displaymanager (probably kdm) when getting rid of KDE.
Logout: It does not go to the same screen as before which had user names and a setting icon to choose among window manager. Now, it’s just a grey screen with entry-field for user-name and password.
Of course. Why should it go to a different login screen than you have when you boot? lol!
IOW, as mentioned above, you are apparently using xdm, and xdm just looks like that.
If you want user names and a setting icon to choose which session to login to, you need to switch to another one.
Splash-screen: Actually not sure what it’s called but it’s gone. It used to show the green Leap logo (diamond shape) during boot but now there are 3 question marks flashing.
That’s the text mode splash screen.
Likely related to your removal of the graphics driver.
Try to remove “nomodeset” from the kernel command line if it’s there, and remove any blacklist for the open source drivers you might have installed to use a proprietary driver, then run “mkinitrd” to make sure that the correct driver is in the initrd (the boot splash is started from there already, long before the root partition is mounted).
Thank you forr answer. Those are good questions and hint. Answers below:
My graphics card is a Radeon R7 Ultimate and it was using the proprietary graphics driver (fglrx), no not NVidia but they seemed to have copied the problem!
Oddly, removing the driver made things work with one error (which I was having in 12.3 with that driver), so I gave it a shot again and unexpectedly it worked.
To remove the drivers i did not blacklist anything, just removed the 5 modules with fglrx and disabled the AMD repo.
Ah, OK. It sounds like I confused some things here, I thought display manager was the same as window manager. Since I am using XFCF now as the latter,
is one of those more compatible? My instinct would be to choose gdm or lightdm maybe.
This is extremely likely as I confused the two. Thank you for pointing this out
Good point. Honestly, I was not sure what these screens were.
Makes sense. Will attempt those this evening. There’s no blacklist, so at least one less thing to check.
It’s always a good idea to reinstall the driver from scratch after an upgrade.
There are completely new versions of the kernel and Xorg, which means the installed driver from the previous openSUSE version might not work.
To remove the drivers i did not blacklist anything, just removed the 5 modules with fglrx and disabled the AMD repo.
Ok, that should normally be enough. But I’m not sure whether the packages will rebuild the initrd so that the radeon driver is in there.
And they definitely won’t revert changes that you might have done manually (like blacklisting radeon or adding “nomodeset”/“radeon.modeset=0” to the boot options).
Ah, OK. It sounds like I confused some things here, I thought display manager was the same as window manager.
Since I am using XFCF now as the latter,
is one of those more compatible? My instinct would be to choose gdm or lightdm maybe.
No, it doesn’t matter what you use. The display manager is completely independent of the desktop session, and the interface is standardized.
With XFCE you’d probably prefer lightdm though, to not have to install additional KDE or GNOME stuff.
sddm would be another option. It is Plasma5’s preferred display manager, but actually only depends on Qt5 (that’s needed by YaST anyway). At least if you don’t want to use the breeze theme that’s part of Plasma5, i.e. you need to install sddm-branding-upstream instead of sddm-branding-openSUSE, the latter will pull in Plasma5.
Makes sense. Will attempt those this evening. There’s no blacklist, so at least one less thing to check.
Yes, I did reinstall fglrx. Now I got ligthdm working too as a Display Manager. For some odd reason, it opens on the secondary screen but it’s not much to complain about
Unless something has changed recently, I have an XFCE 13.1 using xdm that supports auto-login.
Just open the “/etc/sysconfig editor” in YAST, search for “login” and go to the auto-login setting. Enter your preferred Username account, click “Finish” and reboot.
AFAIK all display managers support auto-login (or not).
Then you are likely not using xdm, but something else.
Note that /etc/init.d/xdm does not necessarily start xdm, it’s a general service that runs the displaymanager that’s set in /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager (DISPLAYMANAGER=“xxx”).
xdm does not support auto-login, and that hasn’t changed recently AFAIK.
And how did you check? Maybe you overlooked something…
Set DISPLAYMANAGER=“xdm” to make sure xdm is used, then you should see that auto-login is not working.
Suggest some testing by others to verify one way or another.
The OP already confirmed that auto-login didn’t work for him when he removed kdm, i.e. when using xdm.
To be sure I tried switching to xdm in a 13.1 VM now, and as expected auto-login did not work, although it was enabled in /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager and worked fine with kdm before.
And I have tried it in 13.2 and Leap 42.1 before, with the same result.
OK, I’ll look deeper into this, but it should also be noted that the OP did not configure autologin as I described (your followup specifically describing /etc/sysconfig is same as my description). His method might be ineffective.
In YAST, there are at least a couple places to try to set autologin, the “other” place I assume the OP made his setting is in the individual User Account properties, and I have found in the past it’s not as reliable as setting the /etc/sysconfig.
I described using the /etc/sysconfig editor in YAST which should set the same setting you describe.
IN any case,
Following up on my own system, I verified you are correct (xdm does not support auto-login).
I thought I knew the history of this machine, but it apparently had lightdm installed and set for some long-ago reason. Even when I opened the YAST /etc/sysconfig editor, it displayed “last use” which was this setting, so it was definitely fiddled with.
