OpenSuse Installer Freezing... Just the Dreaded Underscore Over and Over... and Over... and Over

English Install/Boot/Login
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Let me start by saying that I am an experienced Linux desktop user–but my skills are at a fairly novice level. I used Manjaro for a few years before bugs and nuisances led me elsewhere. Since, I’ve tried Solus, KDE Neon, Ubuntu Mate, Arch, Elementary OS… I’ve tinkered with several… played the field, if you will.

I’ve always thought of OpenSuse as more of an enterprise distro, so I didn’t really think it would be for me. Then, a Youtuber I found while looking for Arch tutorials–a gentleman who goes by the handle “Egee”–released a video praising OpenSuse. He declared it to be his desktop of choice. So, I thought I’d give it a go in a VM, and I liked the experience enough to try it out on my workstation. In fact, I was actually quite excited about doing so. Unfortunately, this only made the results more frustrating:

"starting yast…
Starting Installer
Probing connected terminal…

Initializing virtual console…

Found a Linux console terminal on /dev/console.

_ "

I’ve tried a dozen times now, at least; I’ve redownloaded the .iso, tried the NET installer, used 4 or 5 different USB installers… I tried using a spin called Geckolinux… Regardless of the approach, the result is always that bloody underscore. For some reason yet unknown to me, the OpenSuse installer just stops before the point in which the GUI should appear with the EULA.

Since someone is likely to ask, I have a UEFI motherboard–which has been taken into account. It’s an Asus X370 Crosshair VI Hero–paired with a Ryzen 5 1600X and Radeon Pro WX 5100. The hardware components are working just fine–from a purely mechanical standpoint, that is–and I’ve had no issues like this with any other distro I’ve tried.

I’ve never had the best luck with burning Linux ISOs within a Windows OS. Eventually, running a check on one installation medium reported that the installer was bad. Is it possible that Windows is buggering up the installer? Does anyone have any thoughts or potential solutions?

Thank you.

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Some UEFI have a problem installing with secure boot on though you should be able to install the OS with the secure boot box checked and after install turn it back on.

If dual booting turn fast boot off in Windows and if in the UEFI also

.

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Thanks for the reply…

Fast boot and secure boot and all the usual UEFI hurdles have been disabled to the best of my knowledge. I’m not dual-booting; I have Windows on a machine that’s used purely for streaming and playing the occasional bit of FIFA. My workstation build is Linux only.

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Ok then exactly how do you create the install media??

Since GeckoLinux use a different installer I’m a little confused why none works:P

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Using the DVD installer:
See if you can get farther with the ncurses installer.
When you get to the menu, instead of first clicking on the Install entry, highlight it, type “e” to edit, scroll down to the line that begins “linux”, hit the end key to get to the end (it wraps), add a space, then add:

Textmode=1
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Hello,

I burned the ISOs using Etcher, Rufus, ImageUSB, Multiboot, Yumi, and maybe one or two more… I made sure to, where available, use settings/installers that worked with UEFI; the USB is formatted to FAT32.

Regardless of what I’ve done, the end result is that the install media stops where the EULA would normally pop up.

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I shall try that. May I ask what prompts you to think this might resolve the issue? In other words, what is the ncurses installer, and why do think it might help? (I’m only asking because I like to learn.)

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I used my roommate’s daughter’s computer–which I built myself and paired with Ubuntu 18.04–to reformat the USB drive; I installed the DVD installer using the command line. I then updated my motherboard’s BIOS and adjusted the boot settings in order to accommodate non-Windows OS and UEFI. The results were no different than before. I ran a check on the install medium which returned no errors.

I did try the ncurses installer; it worked, but I find it to be disorienting–for lack of a better word. I can do CLI with the right instructions, and I can do modern GUI installer; but the old school, tab through the options is hard for me. Anyway, I tried it and ran into an issue. The installer said I didn’t have a FAT partition with /boot/efi–which isn’t true. I must have made a mistake somewhere.

Does anybody have any idea why the normal installer is failing to load properly? I could understand not starting at all; but it’s weird to me that I can get as far as I can before the installer fails.

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Instead of Textmode=1 try nomodeset and/or failsafe. Other installer options can be found on the Linuxrc page. Given the point at which failure occurs, I would expect you to be able to Ctrl-Alt-F2 and use the cmdline to capture Xorg.0.log for examination, as well as check dmesg and journalctl for clues. Other vttys have messages too. This smells to me like the bugaboo will turn out to be that youthful WX 5100 video has support breakage.

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First of all, I have no idea what most of what you wrote means. Secondly, thank you so very much for taking the time to help.

Prior to reading your post, it occurred to me that the installer wasn’t really freezing; it was just stuck. So, I thought to try a different TTY–I think that is what you call it–once I hit the underscore wall again. CTL+ALT+F7–I think–revealed some sort of error log. Most of what was printed was beyond my knowledge base. However, the word Radeon did seem to appear quite prominently. I’m inclined to agree with your suspicions; I shall attempt the options you provided, but I suspect that I may end up switching out the WX 5100 with my RX 580 from the Windows machine.

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DO NOT use special Linux installer software like Rufus. If you do be absolutely sure that you use only binary copy options. Any modification of the ISO image will break it!!! The image must be unmodified and copied direct to the device not to a partition. on the device.

From Linux use cp or dd to copy the image to the device. From Windows you must use a pure binary copy routine like https://www.osforensics.com/tools/write-usb-images.html

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There is nothing wrong with your installer, your previous posts made that clear to me. You would not have made it as far as you did.

I did try the ncurses installer; it worked, but I find it to be disorienting–for lack of a better word. I can do CLI with the right instructions, and I can do modern GUI installer; but the old school, tab through the options is hard for me. Anyway, I tried it and ran into an issue. The installer said I didn’t have a FAT partition with /boot/efi–which isn’t true.

You could have just continued with the install and ignored that message, I believe, and the install would have been good. In any case, even if the install concludes and does its reboot, we can see how far we got. If it does not boot after that, it should then be easier to help once it is installed.

My reason for going ncurses here is because you have a problem most likely related to graphics, could be the driver, or some other HW process that depends on knowing the graphics. That ncurses ran indicates to me that the problem is due to slightly uncommon HW.

You could try, as suggested, adding

nomodeset

at the end of the command line instead of

Textmode=1

If that works, then you are on your way. If it does not, try the ncurses install again, make note of any errors or warnings it pops up, but keep going. If install fails then, post the errors/warnings/messages here.

Does anybody have any idea why the normal installer is failing to load properly? I could understand not starting at all; but it’s weird to me that I can get as far as I can before the installer fails.

Yes. “Unusual” HW, or a temporary problem with the latest TW snapshots. I suspect the former.

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… in your case, I suspect the Radeon card and related driver, BTW. That can probably be solved once you get openSUSE installed.

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Thank you, again, for all of your help. So, if I understand correctly, appending “nomodeset” to the end of the command line will dictate that the default graphics driver not be used. What will be used instead?

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A fall back driver until you can fix the problem It will be lower res and less capable but should be supported by all cards

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Probably fbdev, possibly vesa. Both are fallback/failsafe-type drivers that provide limited functionality and won’t use any widescreen mode.

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Try selecting NOAPIC from Grub2 bottom right menu before installing openSUSE.

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Read that message carefully.

It may say that you didn’t have a FAT partition for “/boot/efi” which is at least 256M. If your EFI partition is smaller than that, but is big enough, then just ignore the message and continue anyway. The installer only needs an additional 5M on that partition. It is just being excessively fussy.

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Now that the weekend has arrived, I have time to try and get this working. I did as recommended–used “nomodeset” to install with a minimal but functional GUI; the install seemed to go just fine, and the system boots. However, shortly after GRUB, I get error messages such as “Virtual Console failed to set up” (or something like that) and “VGACON disables amdgpu”.

I was given the option to login at the TTY, which I did successfully. I then used Zypper to search for and install any “amdgpu”-related packages. I rebooted to the same errors.

So, I thought that, perhaps, the “nomodeset” may be be pervasive; I went back into the launch entry and removed it. Reboot… I’m now looking at the OpenSUSE KDE desktop. Awesome.

So, is there anything else I’m missing? It looks like the job is done. I’d like to say “thank you” to everyone for helping. Compared to some other forums–*coff *Arch Linux coff coff–my experience here thus far has been very positive. I’m going to go play around in OpenSUSE for a bit. I’m really keen on learning more about YaST.

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I think everyone gets that “Virtual Console” message, and it does not seem to cause any problems. I don’t have an amdgpu, so I have no experience with that.