I just came home and can’t start up the OpenSUSE system installed on one of my partitions. Right before reaching the login screen my display turns off itself and my keyboard starts to blink.
When I hit an arrow key while starting the machine to view all the output I noticed that it crashes right after ‘Reached Graphical Interface’ (or some similar output).
I’m running OpenSUSE 13.1 64bit. I installed the proprietary nVidia drivers yesterday. It’s probably driver related, isn’t it?
Did anything similar happen to anyone here? How did you fix it?
So, I chose advanced options and since my GRUB seems to run at resolution of 640*480 I could read the full names of the entries. Randomly picking the fourth option brought me to my login screen.
I entered my login details and got to my default desktop running at a very low resolution.
You can configure Grub2’s resolution in YaST->System->Boot Loader->Boot Loader Options, and this should also have effect for your desktop when running in Recovery mode.
Grub2’s auto-detection of the screen resolution doesn’t seem to work on nvidia cards (at least with the proprietary driver installed)
How do I proceed now?
So this seems to be indeed related to the graphics driver.
First, please post a list of all kernel and nvidia packages installed, maybe there is a mismatch:
rpm -qa | egrep "(kernel|nvidia)"
Then, please do a normal boot. When the screen turns off, reboot to recovery mode and post the file /var/log/Xorg.0.log.old (paste/upload it to http://susepaste.org or a similar pasting/sharing site and post a link).
This should show why the driver is not working.
Uninstall nvidia-uvm-gfxG03-kmp-default and install nvidia-uvm-gfxG03-kmp-desktop instead.
But that should not really cause this problem AFAIK.
(although it might, so try a normal boot again afterwards)
Hm. That is from recovery mode.
Did you do a normal boot in between as I wrote?
Then it would seem that X is not even trying to start, which would imply that it is not related to the graphics driver after all.
I suppose you have the problem with kernel 3.11.10.
Can you try kernel 3.11.6? (the normal one, not recovery mode)
Yeah, I thought so.
nvidia-uvm-gfxG03-kmp is mainly needed for CUDA support.
After booting with the standard option again and rebooting into recovery mode after that I found the log file to be empty. What did I do wrong?
Hm, it shouldn’t be empty.
Two more things to try:
disable plymouth, by pressing ‘e’ at the boot menu screen (with the standard entry selected), search for a line starting with “linux” and append “playmouth.enable=0” at the end. Then press ‘F10’ to boot.
Do you see the same behavior then?
try to boot to text mode, by adding ‘3’ to the line starting with plymouth. Does this work?
Log in to text mode as root, then run init 5 to start the graphical system.
Does the same thing happen now?
PS: You mentioned that your keyboard starts to blink. This normally means that there’s a kernel panic.
Could you please provide the file /var/log/messages? Might be quite big though, so you might better upload it somewhere (maybe even compressed).
Hm, so you cannot even boot to text mode?
Strange. Never seen something like this to be caused by installing the nvidia driver…
So maybe there’s another reason.
If it is indeed caused by the nvidia driver, you could try to install it by using the .run installer from the nvidia hompage: http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NVIDIA_the_hard_way
(though I don’t really see a possible packaging problem here)
Or maybe try with the G02 driver instead? I.e. install those packages either with YaST or zypper:
nvidia-gfxG02-kmp-desktop nvidia-computeG02 x11-video-nvidiaG02
PS: Maybe it’s caused by invalid EDID data coming from your monitor? I.e. the system boots fine, but uses an invalid screen mode. Wouldn’t explain that there’s no Xorg.0.log or the binking keyboard though.
But try to add the following to the boot options as a test before uninstalling the nvidia G03 driver:
I’m sure it’s fine because I don’t have any issues using Windows on this machine. I play many newer 3D games so I believe I’d knew in advance. But I’ll try to hook my screen up to my onboard GPU and see if it makes any difference after trying out wolfi323`s solutions.
@all: Thanks for all your patience guys. I’ll report back after doing what you said.
when I tried the command which includes rpm I got this output:
linux-2b8b:/home/david # rpm -e nvidia-gfxG03-kmp-desktop nvidia-uvm-gfxG03-kmp-desktop nvidia-computeG03 nvidia-glG03 x11-video-nvidiaG03
error: Failed dependencies:
libGL.so.1 is needed by (installed) libqt4-x11-32bit-4.8.5-5.9.2.x86_64
libGL.so.1 is needed by (installed) libQtWebKit4-32bit-4.8.5+2.3.3-2.6.1.x86_64
libGL.so.1 is needed by (installed) libGLU1-32bit-9.0.0-7.1.2.x86_64
libGL.so.1 is needed by (installed) wine-32bit-1.7.2-2.1.x86_64
How do I proceed here?
Adding that line you mentioned to the grub entry seems to make my computer take a bit more time to crash.
I’m quite busy now, so I’ll try out the rest in the evening.
Connecting my display to my onboard GPU didn’t help.
Most of the packages that have been installed must have been installed with opensuse updates I allowed my computer to do before downloading the drivers. Wine was installed afterwards.
I’ll try installing the mesa libs and see if they help uninstalling the driver.
In case this won’t help I’ll reinstall OpenSUSE and try the run package by nvidia. If this fails, too, I’m going to install the 32 bit version of OpenSUSE.
There must be a way to make OpenSUSE run on this computer. It runs so well on my much worse notebook. lol!
Ok. I suppose the other three packages are required by wine-32bit then.
I’ll try installing the mesa libs and see if they help uninstalling the driver.
Yes it should.
It didn’t get installed automatically as the nvidia driver provides a 32bit version of libGL.so.1 as well, which is required by those packages.
There must be a way to make OpenSUSE run on this computer. It runs so well on my much worse notebook. lol!
Yes, of course.
And it does work in recovery mode, right?
Would be interesting to know if it’s really related to the installation of the nvidia driver, or if it doesn’t work without it as well.
If it was the driver, you might try the G02 driver instead, or stick with nouveau (maybe updating that and the kernel to the latest version might be a good idea in that case).
Although a BIOS update (if possible/available) might help as well.
I prefer to advise the rpm version though, as uninstalling it via YaST/zypper will mark the packages as unwanted, which might cause problems when you ever try to install them again.
But I think there are no more packages needed by Mesa-32bit, so that rpm command should work after installing Mesa-libEGL1-32bit anyway.
I uninstalled the nvidia driver successfully and got into textmode using the normal boot option.
I provided my login details and typed “su” afterwards to become root. Then I typed in “init 5” which did fine until “Reached Graphical User Interface”. After that it did nothing (but no crash or kernel panic).
I rebooted again and logged in. After that I typed in “startx” and it failed telling me to check /var/log/Xorg.0.log. The file says that the nvidia module isn’t loaded.
“startx” doesn’t work as a normal user since years because of missing permissions, only as root.
On a default installation that is. There are ways to make it work, but they impose a security risk.
But you shouldn’t need that anyway. If Xorg fails to start when calling “init 5” (or booting to runlevel5), “startx” probably won’t work either.
What do I do now?
Remove /etc/X11/xorg.conf .
Apparently that is telling Xorg to load the nvidia driver, which isn’t installed any more.