I’ve been using openSUSE since 9.2 and have not had issues which have been unsolvable.
I’ve just done a new installation of openSUSE 13.1 64 bit. Everything goes fine, and I can use it etc, but after I shutdown the first time and re-boot I get a blank screen.
It goes past the boot fine, shows the background image and the KDE icons appear in the centre. Then the background image and icons fade out to black and I can only see the mouse pointer. The mouse still moves but there’s nothing to click on.
If I hard reset I get the same thing.
If I wait 15min or so it shows the enter password to unlock screen box, but when I move the mouse it disappears.
I previously had openSUSE 12.1 and kept my home partition.
Hardware is a Asus P6T Mother board
Intel i7-920
3GB RAM
Nvidia Graphics GeForce GTS 250 (Asus ENGTS250 1G DK)
Are you using auto-login? (generally a bad idea for a desktop machine IMO.)
It sounds as iKDE config files are incompatible.
Can you use "<ctrl>+<LT>+<f1> to get to a terminal session?
OR
Can you select “advanced options” at the grub menu and start in failsafe/emergency mode?
Please press Alt+F2 and enter “plasma-desktop” there (without the quotes).
Does it work then?
Could be graphics driver related.
Have you tried booting to “recovery mode”? (“Advanced Options” in the boot menu)
Does it work when you rename the plasma configuration file ~/.kde4/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletsrc?
(you can run apps like dolphin and konsole by pressing Alt+F2 and typing the name in)
I think it was Auto Login. By pressing the power button it showed the Logout - Restart - Shutdown menu, then I could Logout and sign in as me and it was fine.
But it’s a strange process to have to go through every time you turn on. I turned off auto login and it’s much better though it doesn’t auto login.
As for the security of auto-login, if I want to have a insecure machine that anyone can come along and turn on and use, why can’t I. It’s nice to have the option to choose to be insecure if you want to.
Thanks for your suggestions. I also tried the failsafe login, but it did the same thing.
This is a fairly major problem.
I don’t know if it makes any difference but I had a separate user password and root password.
This could be caused by plymouth (the bootsplash) then.
KDM quits plymouth, so it is not running anymore when you get the login screen. But with auto-login it may as well still be running when KDE starts up.
Can you try to turn on autologin again, and see if the boot option “plymouth.enable=0” would help?
I will try as well, but I’m not sure if I can even reproduce your original problem…
As expected, I cannot reproduce this on my system even with auto-login turned on. (if it was a general problem, many more people would have complained by now…)
So I suspect it is graphics driver related (maybe in combination with plymouth).
Again, what gfx card do you have?
I know of another user who was experiencing a “black screen” after boot (but he hasn’t tried to turn off auto-login AFAIK), for him it was fixed by installing the fglrx driver.
I re-enabled Auto login and did a reboot to see if the problem was still there, and it booted fine. So I can’t reproduce it.
The only way I could re-produce it would be to do a fresh install, because the first time I saw the problem I re-installed and the problem was still there.
My Graphics card is a Nvidia Graphics GeForce GTS 250 (Asus ENGTS250 1G DK) (see top). I haven’t installed the proper drivers for it, just the automatic/default one.
It must have been something to do with the auto login, I saw an error on RC2 on google for this too. I’m using the final though.
I had to logout from the black screen, and then login again.