Opensuse 13.1 install issue: only in recovery mode

Hello,

May I ask for your help in the following issues. In your replies please be specific since I am not an expert, just a fan of openSUSE.

The problems in a nutshell:

P1) The installation seems to run only in recovery mode.
P2) The Broadcom ethernet card does not seem to be recognized.
P3) Resume from a Suspend to RAM does not work.

The details: My goal is to set up a laptop dual-booting Windows 8.1 64bit and openSUSE 13.1 64bit with KDE. The laptop is an Acer Aspire E1-572G bought new in January 2014.

Already to start with, I had trouble installing oS13.1 64bit. The KDE live DVD could not figure out the ethernet card, but would not ask about the wireless card either. The network installation DVD also could not figure out the ethernet card, but would only ask a limited number of security configurations. I could not find a way to connect to a wireless network that asks for username/ password combination. Finally I created and used the full DVD repository. Only at a later point I was able to download updates. - If this is off-topic here, please let me know where I can comment on this.

Ad P1): Booting into regular mode ends up with a login prompt to virtual console tty1. I can switch by <Alt-F10> to some sort of message log. When I switch by <Alt-F7>, the last line says,

OK ] Started LSB: X Display Manager.Dispatcher Service…[some mambo-jumbo]…

and the laptop is locked, i.e., does not react to any key, not even <Cntrl-Alt-Del>. Pressing the power button takes out of there. My graphics card is an AMD Radeon HD 8670M, 1GB VRAM according to a label on the machine. Yast - Hardware - Hardware Information dump file indicates “Radeon HD 8670A”. Guessing from similar posts (not specifically helpful in my case), I posted a couple of log files written when trying to boot into regular mode: Xorg.0.log-regular, boot.log-regular, messages-regular.lst .

Ad P2): The hardware info file shows a Broadcom NetXtreme BCM57786 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe. Looking at Yast - Network Settings, tab Overview, the “Broadcom Ethernet controller” is “not configured” and refers to dmesg output which is here. The card works as tested under Windows.

Ad P3): When I suspend to RAM and want to resume, pressing e.g. the space bar seems to set the hard drive in motion, but the screen remains off. Unfortunately I am not knowledgeable enough to provide more information at this point.

I would appreciate your help to get these issues sorted out. Thank you!

Your card is quite new, so it may not be supported too well by the open source radeon driver included in openSUSE 13.1.

You should get to a graphical system by choosing “Recovery Mode” in “Advanced Options” in the boot menu.
I would suggest to install the proprietary fglrx driver then, that one should work with your card.
https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:AMD_fglrx

This might also solve your suspend/resume problem already.

Regarding your network problem, you should better start a new thread about this in the “Network” section of the forum.
Actually you should always start separate threads for different problems in the appropriate sub-forum.

A quick google revealed that your network card should be supported by the latest 3.13 kernel though.
You could install that by running this in a terminal window:

sudo zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Kernel:/stable/standard/ Kernel:stable
sudo zypper in kernel-desktop-3.13.3

The old kernel should stay installed, you could select that under “Advanced Options” in the boot menu if the newer one would give you problems.

I want to stress the organisational point wolfi323 already mentioned.

Do make a new thread for every single problem. It should be obvious why:

  • almost always the several problems questions belong to different forums;
  • answers on several questions in the same thread tend make a real mess of the whole string of posts where nobody knows in the end where to find contributions to which problem (O yes, the third paragraph in the fifth post also contains info about the second problem of this thread >:));
  • there will be people that do not even start to read a threads contents when the thread title is such a dustbin of questions/problems (not what you want I assume).

Thank you for your technical hints, wolfi323, and all the organizational remarks.

Hence, about the network card I posted at http://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/495573-Opensuse-13-1-64bit-issue-no-ethernet-card .

The graphical issue is at http://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/495574-Opensuse-13-1-64bit-issues-Graphical-system-only-in-recovery-mode-no-resume-from-suspend-to-RAM

Leaves my remarks about the Live DVD resp. net install. How to proceed about those?

Removed the other subjects from your title.

On 2014-02-17 15:46, paschuller wrote:

> Leaves my remarks about the Live DVD resp. net install. How to proceed
> about those?

Well, your computer is new. With Linux that means that not all hardware
will be supported yet.

If the network hardware doesn’t work out of the box, you can not use the
net install. bad luck. You can use the live gnome/kde dvd installs, but
I would prefer to use the full DVD install: more available packages till
the moment I can get network running.

Possibly 13.2 or even later will work better.

On the other hand, I try to avoid having to use wireless during install.
It is a pain to configure. Even when the hardware is fully supported.


Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.

(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” (Minas Tirith))