OS 12.3 x64 under vmware (win 7 pro) KDM critical error

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hi,

After a bit of help…

I have just installed Opensuse 12.3 (x64, KDE live CD) onto a vmware guest running under Win7 pro 64bit (it’s a domain laptop if that makes a difference).

The guest has 4G of ram (out of 8), 100G space and has been allocated 2 processor cores (out of 4) - it’s a core i3 quad.
The install went reasonably OK. The only change I made to the default was to elect to boot from the MBR rather than /

One thing it didn’t do is create the user: In the install I created a user called “james” with password “whatever” and elected to use this password as the root password too.

Upon installation & reboot, KDM gave a critical error and I couldn’t log in. I went to ctrl-alt-F1 and logged in as root & a “cat /etc/passwd” and “id james” told me there was no such user.
I created the user using useradd:

# useradd james -m -g users
# passwd james

I can log in at the console with this user now.

KDM is still an issue though - when it appears it shows this message:

Logging in linux...
A critical error occurred.
Please look at KDM's logfile(s) for more info ... <blah blah>

Clicking OK to that shows KDM with my user “james” listed on the left. However it won’t accept keyboard input (ie I can’t type in either the username or password boxes). I can click on “james” and that username gets populated but I can’t type a password.

So I looked in /var/log/kdm.log and see this (sorry I can’t copy n paste, so am typing it in):

...
initializing built-in extension DRI2
Loading extension GLX
klauncher(895) kdemain: No DBUS session-bus found. Check if you have started the DBUS server.
kdeinit4: Communication error with launcher. Exiting!
kdmgreet(775) kdecore (K*TimeZone*): KSystemTimeZones: ktimezoned initialise() D-Bus call failed: "Not connected to D-Bus server"

kdmgreet(775)/kdecore (K*TImeZone*): No time zone information obtained from ktimezoned
(II) VMWARE(0): vmmouse enable absolute mode

I have tried (from console) running zypper ref & then zypper up which installed 101 new things & updated a load more. Then rebooted but the same issue. I downloaded the ISO image from the opensuse site today & have verified the md5.

EDIT: I have also done:

# /etc/init/d/xdm restart
redirecting to systemctl restart xdm

Which restarts kdm, but with the same result as before

Any clues at all??

2

Sorry, Bump.

Does anyone have an idea how to proceed from here? Searching hasn’t really turned up much (by which I mean, nothing) that’s useful or informative. I do refuse to believe that you can’t run OS 12.3 under vmware… that would be very strange…

A bit of info I forgot to mention: the laptop’s drive is full-disk encrypted with TrueCrypt - I don’t think that should matter to a guest under vmware though.

Also, I have ubuntu 12.whatever (LTS release, server option) installed in a vm on the same laptop & that works perfectly.

3

Did you try to click into the password field first? Maybe it is just not activated.

Does xdm work?
Edit /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager, change DISPLAYMANAGER=“kdm” to DISPLAYMANAGER=“xdm” and reboot.

4

I would find that strange as well. I haven’t tried it in vmware yet, but in VirtualBox it runs without a problem.

5

Yeup I clicked the password field, many times! neither textbox accepts input.

I didn’t try xdm - I’ll give that a whirl, thanks.

6

One of the nice things about virtualization is how disposable VMs are.

Recommend creating a new VM with a different machine name, see if the error is re-created or perhaps an anomaly of your first attempt.

And, although unrelated I recommend accepting the default to boot using a / mount point. There is no advantage I can think of to diverge, the system will use whatever disk geometry and partitions including use of the MBR (more than likely) of your virtual disk.

TSU