Orange Pi 5 with UEFI stalls at detecting hardware

[snow]

Greetings friends, I am an Orange Pi 5 (plain model) owner and have the edk2 v1.1 UEFI BIOS installed on it. Previously was using something called BredOS which was just abandoned this month, so I started exploring other arm64 distros and read some comments that openSUSE Tumbleweed was a great choice!

Sadly, I cannot get into the OS?

I burned the offline image to my USB stick and booted it with no problem at all, I saw the nice graphical GRUB interface and chose the “Installation” option where it then says Loading basic drivers and then stalls on Hardware detection seemingly?

Thanks for any guidance!

[snow]

Still stuck, if anyone has been through it before I’d love to know what to do

[kasi042]

Hi snow,
Welcome to the forum. I’m sorry, I won’t be able to help in detail, as I’m on Leap and don’t have your hardware. Just a general shot in the dark:
How did you burn the image to your USB stick? In case you used ventoy, try with a different tool, best would be dd. There’s many cases in this forum showing ventoy creates problems with the images as it modifies them, somehow. So, it’s not recommended. I can’t give much more advice. Hopefully someone else can join in.
Have a lot of fun!

[snow]

Thank you for at least reading and responding!

I just wanted to report back with an update

So, even though the terminal was frozen on Hardware Detection I went and checked the other tty’s, on 2 of the other consoles there’s more detailed output, and it appears it was hanging in part because it was trying to download files from an openSUSE server and hitting error 404 as a result on the URL’s. The image I downloaded was specifically marked “offline installer” and something like 4gb large, so I never anticipated it would need to be online for an offline installer.

I plugged in the ethernet port, and rebooted again - and this time, it proceeded much further. To the point that it spawned a bunch of shells on tty’s 2, 5, 6 as well

Then, I still didn’t know what to do, as the main tty1 was still just sitting on Hardware detection, then there were 3 “emergency shells” and output from the log in the other 2 windows.

One of the last messages in one of the log windows shows that it was trying to run ‘setsid -wc inst_setup yast’

I didn’t know what this was, so I tried running ‘inst_setup yast’ by hand from the terminal where it popped open a ncurses-based graphical installer app, but then said it was already locked by another process. It was the setsid -wc inst_setup yast command in the debug log that was seemingly stuck or frozen, and needed to kill -9 that process #.

THEN, finally, I manually ran setsid -wc inst_setup yast at the shell prompt, and it proceeded with that installer program without any further major issues. Success! Finally!

so in a nutshell if anyone with an Orange Pi 5 ends up in the same boat: you need to make sure the device has wired ethernet at hardware detection time, and furthermore may need to kill -9 that failed process and re-launch it manually

Also, I chose KDE Desktop originally and the performance was ATROCIOUS. But ‘echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE’ shows it was x11. I used zypper to install gnome instead and rebooted into GNOME and the performance difference is incredible – make sure you’re using Gnome/Wayland

[kasi042]

Glad you made it!