Hey everyone,
Im having problems booting Opensuse 11.4. Everytime i try and boot the live cd. I get the menu choosing what i want to do and when i click on try live cd or something. I goes to the opensuse logo with that boot bar and then all i get is the snowy screen. And i cant do anything. Can anyone help please?
Thanks
You could also try the boot code ‘nomodeset’ and if that does not work try the boot code ‘x11failsafe’, or try the menu item (under F3 I think) ‘safe settings’ .
Sorry but I can not understand your problem very clearly. Could you explain us what is wrong, I understand that you have problem with live cd on booting, could you give us more information??
Im having problems booting Opensuse 11.4. The screen goes all misty/snowy and thats all it does. But the person who replied earlier said to put those commands in at boot. I tried the failsafe menu under F3 and that didnt work. i type in ‘Nomodeset’ and that seams to sort the problem out. But whats causing this problem? Also in KDE theres no battery icon in the task bar. And the mouse isnt working correctly either. But they work fine in GNOME.
Glad to read that nomodeset works. Using that boot code disables modesetting, and its use is mentioned in the openSUSE-11.4 release notes.
To be more specific I would need to know more about the graphic hardware on your PC. Can you please type in a terminal/konsole the command:
/sbin/lspci -nnk | grep VGA -A3
and post here the output you get from that command … ie locate in the output from the /sbin/lspci command the line with the word “VGA” in the line. And then copy that line and the following 3 lines and post that content here in your post/reply to this post.
That will tell us exactly what graphics your PC has and hopefully enable us to answer your question “whats causing the problem”.
I confess I am surprised that the ‘failsafe’ menu under F3 did not work.
I recommend you start a new help thread on the question of “battery icon missing from task bar”.
Here is the reply i got from that command:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: ATI Technologies Inc Mobility Radeon HD 3400 Series [1002:95c4]
Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:0254]
01:00.1 Audio device [0403]: ATI Technologies Inc RV620 Audio device [Radeon HD 34xx Series] [1002:aa28]
Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:0254]
My graphics card is a ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3400 Series
OK, thanks.
Unfortunately the command I asked you to run, in this case, did not indicate the video driver in use, but my guess (based on my having a PC with an AMD Radeon HD 3450 graphics) is that the liveCD, with the ‘nomodeset’ boot code, booted to the ‘radeonhd’ driver. I think if when running the liveCD, you were to look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log file you would observe that the ‘radeonhd’ driver was loaded.
I wrote a bug report on openSUSE-11.4 in this case, where it fails to boot without ‘nomodeset’ . This boot (without requiring ‘nomodeset’ ) worked in openSUSE-11.3 and in 11.4 right up to RC1 where a regression was introduced.
While I have not installed openSUSE-11.4 on my laptop (with the Radeon HD 3450) I am confident such an install would graphically work with the nomodeset boot code. After installation, I suspect one would still need to use the ‘nomodeset’ boot code, until one did one of two recommended things:
Hey,
sorry for the late reply. I will more likely go for installing the catalyst control centre. Can i ask? How come Opensuse doesent have as much software in the add/remove programs and in repository?
I concede I do not understand your repository comment. I confess the comment leads me to believe you need to learn more as to how repositories are setup on openSUSE, as there is a LOT of software available in a massive number of different repositories. So much in fact I am on record recommending that users significantly reduce their repositories to only OSS, Non-OSS, and Update (the 3 official repositories) and Packman (the largest 3rd party repository) and to no others (nominally).
So you will need to explain your question about repositories further in order for me to understand it - because I do not.
Now since the AMD proprietary Catalyst driver is proprietary and NOT free (as per the Free Software Foundation definition of “free” ) you will NOT find it in an official openSUSE repository. Note the “open” in openSUSE.
In the case of the AMD proprietary Catalyst driver, one method of installing that driver (and there are multiple different ways to install the driver) is to add a custom AMD proprietary graphic driver repository for openSUSE. That is NOT an official openSUSE repository, because it is NOT consistent with the openSUSE packaging philosophy of mostly free open source software.
There is a link with guidance here for installing the proprietary AMD Catalyst driver via different methods: SDB:ATI drivers - openSUSE
Note also this URL on the 6th thing to try in this page SDB:Configuring graphics cards - openSUSE where it notes it may also be necessary to run “yast” (you can run yast in text mode with root permissions if X window not available) and navigate to yast > System > /etc/sysconfig Editor > System > Kernel > NO_KMS_IN_INITRD and change it to “yes”. This takes a minute or two to save once changed is submitted. IMHO that is best done BEFORE one installs/builds the proprietary catalyst driver.
There is a repository method mentioned there in the link I quoted, but I confess I do not use that method. Instead I use the ‘manual’ method (which once upon a time was called "the hardway (which is not hard) " but the oxymoron nature of that decription lead it to be more accurately called the ‘manual’ method): SDB:ATI drivers - openSUSE - building FGLRX manually
Thanks for that, i will give it ago. How do you enable more software in the repository? Because there doesent seam to be much software in it. Can i ask, which do you use GNOME or KDE?
Thanks
Reference your repository question, I do not use the repository method for installing the video graphic driver. To quote:
Did you read the link I quoted ?
Reference your GNOME or KDE question, on our four 64-bit PCs (nVidia GTX-260, nVidia G210, AMD Radeon HD3450, and AMD Radeon HD4200) I have KDE, and on my 32-bit PC (nVidia FX5200) I have LXDE, and on our very old laptop (32-bit) with i855GM graphics I have Gnome.
Ahh thats cool. I mean how do you get full software in the repository? And why isnt it there by default?
I tried to explain that above. I’ll quote:
Now since the AMD proprietary Catalyst driver is proprietary and NOT free (as per the Free Software Foundation definition of “free” ) you will NOT find it in an official openSUSE repository. Note the “open” in openSUSE.
In the case of the AMD proprietary Catalyst driver, one method of installing that driver (and there are multiple different ways to install the driver) is to add a custom AMD proprietary graphic driver repository for openSUSE. That is NOT an official openSUSE repository, because it is NOT consistent with the openSUSE packaging philosophy of mostly free open source software.
By default, SuSE-GmbH place only Free (open source) software in the ‘official’ default OSS repository (OSS = Open Source Software). There is a small amount of Non-OSS (Non-Open Source Software) in the ‘official’ non-OSS repository, and SuSE-GmbH are working to reduce the amount of packages there in the Non-OSS all the time. I think it was back in openSUSE-10.1 when ALL graphic proprietary drivers were removed from ‘official’ openSUSE repositories.
As I tried to explain above, since proprietary graphic driver software is NOT ‘free’ software, as per the Free Software Foundation definition of ‘free’, such proprietary graphic driver software is NOT included with openSUSE ‘official’ repositories. SuSE-GmbH ONLY wants ‘free’ software in openSUSE. NOTE please the emphasis on “open”.
By ‘free’ software they mean:
You are NOT allowed to modify and give away proprietary graphic software. Nor are you given the source code. Hence the proprietary graphic software driver(s) are NOT free software, and hence they are NOT included with openSUSE official repositories.
Now not all distributions (nor all openSUSE users) strictly adhere to the principles of the Free Software foundation, and as such 3rd party repositories (which are NOT official) have been created for proprietary software and non-free software (free as Software Foundation definition of free).
Note we are not talking ‘free’ as in cost. We are talking ‘free’ as in freedom.
And if this use of ‘free’ looks like a ‘political’ movement, indeed for some it is (a political movement).
Now reference software repositories, if you stick with ONLY 4 repositories: OSS and Non-OSS, and Update (the 3 official repositories) and Packman (the largest 3rd party not-official repository) you will have most the applications one will want. For the remaining applications (such as drivers already built, and other apps) one can go obtain them from various custom repositories and the build service. BUT note stick with ONLY the 4 I noted, and add others only BRIEFLY and then remove them afterwards, else if one is a beginner one will almost certainly have problems due to a lack of understanding of dependencies and information/warning messages from package management.
Again, ONLY OSS, Non-OSS, Update and Packman (and others ONLY very very very briefly).
I hope that makes this a bit more clear ?
If you require a specific package that is not in the official repos try searching in the wepin section of Yast.
crash-overr1de, further to gogalthorp’s post, there is a super search engine for openSUSE rpms here: software.opensuse.org: Search Results
To get a wider search (picking up rpms packaged by dozens of openSUSE enthusiasts who maintain their own repositories) in that URL software.opensuse.org: Search Results click on “Search options” and then select "Include users’ home projects ".
Just note that the ‘further’ one gets from an rpm packaged on an ‘official’ SuSE-GmbH repository, to some unknown user’s repository, the less likely any rpm will have been thoroughly tested.
Hi,
I 'd like to thank oldcpu for his help to my problem.
It is pretty the same as it is described in the begining of this thread: I had a fresh new installation of 11.4, working very nice for the first week. After some time, while I have probably installed all updates, it could not boot propertly any more. It was starting grub, then the green screen with the logo and the progress bar and then a quiet hang on. The progress bar was indicating only a millimeter of progress. Then I had to hard reset.
Oldcpu’s suggestion for “nomodeset” was very helpful, and my netbook seemed to boot alright, but the screen resolution was wrong and always typing in boot time was not the desired behavior of the system.
So, I followed his “openSUSE Graphic Card Practical Theory Guide for Users” and now everything is back to normal.
Command /sbin/lspci -nnk | grep VGA -A3 returned:
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GME Express Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:27ae] (rev 03)
All I had to do was open my /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-device.conf file and add the line Driver “intel” right after* #Driver “radeon”*.
Thanks again, oldcpu (I hope you had a nice time in France).
Greetings from sunny Thassos, Greece.
Well done! I’m curious, are you now booting still with ‘nomodeset’ AND the edit in the 50-device.conf file ?
I just got back home less than an hour ago from my business trip. Weather in Cannes France was sunny and hot. Lots of great restaurants, although typically in a business trip its 100% business with no time to sight see. Still, its good to be back home in Germany.
Well, in my happiness, I forgot to mention this. No, nomodeset is no more needed, and as I didn’t said above, everything is ok now. I’m a happy opensuse user, again.
Thank you for the help.
BTW, if you ever visit Thassos for vacation, I’d be glad to show you around 
Thats great to read. And interesting for me to learn also. Modesetting is supposed to help the kernel automatically configure one’s graphics. For some reason, modesetting did not help your graphics automatically configure. By using ‘nomodeset’ you forced the FBDEV graphic driver, and then by putting ‘intel’ in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-device.conf file, you forced the Intel graphic driver.
Ergo I guess you no longer need ‘nomodeset’ nor do you need to rely on the kernel modesetting because the driver is now specified in the configuration file (50-device.conf).
This is all becoming clearer.
Thanks! A wonderful invitation. Maybe some day.