Tumbleweed 20190403 to 20190409 giving a real hard time - Various install/setup failures

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Sorry if this looks like a rant - it is more a nearly desperate call for help. I have been running Tumbleweed for two years now on one machine, and it has always been nice to administrate and use. Now I am trying to install it on another recently acquired machine, very similar to the first one. Both are HP EliteBook laptops, one 8560w and now an 8570w.

In a first attempt, I installed a fresh Tumbleweed 20190403 KDE/Plasma on the 8570w. All went well, but installing VirtualBox 6.0.4 on it and getting it to run turned out to be more difficult than just running YaST on the packages I had been used to for so long. It turned out vboxdrv was missing, and VirtualBox via lots of Oracle error messages called for installing kernel-devel, kernel-default-devel, virtualbox-host-source, gcc and make, and then run sudo /sbin/vboxconfig. At least that gave me a running VirtualBox host system. I then built a virtual Tumbleweed machine from the same 20190403, but that one ended up in a mess when trying to get the guest additions installed. In the openSUSE Factory mailing list, some talk showed up regarding mismatches between the kernel version and the VirtualBox packages.

The next more horrible issues came up when updating the 20190403 bare-metal installation to 20190408 this morning (zypper ref/dup, of course). The update went well, but at reboot emergency mode was entered with “failed to start Load Kernel Modules”. I tried to make sense out of the recommended error logs and status checks, but to no avail. Several reboot attempts ended up in emergency as well. I figured the various attempts to get VB running contributed to the mess.

Thus, I decided to just scrap those two 20190403 installations, the VM and the bare-metal one - so much work and time lost on installing and fine tuning all settings and applications.
>:(

So I downloaded Tumbleweed 20190408 this morning and installed the operating system and the desired application packages again. It pulled in 20190409 updates in the process. The bare operating operating system seemed fine. Then I installed the desired applications EXCEPT for VirtualBox. However, now NONE of those applications shows up in the starter menu, not even after reboot (which isn’t necessary, of course). Why is that?
>:)

I must say I am pretty much disgusted with Tumbleweed these days.

My first priority would be to understand why all the newly installed applications don’t show up in the Plasma starter menu. Is there a way to fix that easily? Did I miss any YaSt or Plasma setting? Please be aware that I have been running Tumbleweed for 2 years, and I had several virtual machines during that time, but I didn’t experience such a failure yet. I will not take the pain to build them all by hand. I am willing to provide more background as needed.

Understanding the kernel versus VirtualBox stuff that happened in the first attempt (mismatched versions, vboxdrv missing, vboxsf [shared folders] not compiling/functioning) would be a much lower priority.

Thank you in advance for any help. If I don’t succeed easily, I tend to quit installing Tumbleweed now, wait for some release rollings and only then try to install again.

Sorry … a now VERY unhappy Tumbleweed user, whose experience over the last two years had been so different, Tumbleweed never letting me down yet except for the last few days.

2

Hi
Well that’s the joys of running a third party application and kernel updates… consider using the kernel virtual environments available?

Did you try booting into the previous kernel and letting it rebuild the kernel modules?

I would keep an eye on the development project in the future and see if you pick up issues before considering moving to the next snapshot?
https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/Virtualization/virtualbox

I can see it’s rebuilt (3.2) and another build blocked (which will push to 3.3 if it’s a true rebuild)…
https://build.opensuse.org/package/binaries/openSUSE:Factory/virtualbox/standard

You can see the reason for the rebuild here;
https://build.opensuse.org/packages/virtualbox/build_reason/openSUSE:Factory/standard/x86_64

Perhaps look at running tumbleweed-cli to rollback…

It can also be an out of sync mirror, and the latest snapshot release today 20190409.

Edit: I also see there was a 20190408 snapshot you skipped with a whole bunch of plasma updates along with the kernel.

3

I’ll start by noting that I use Leap, because of its stability. So I avoid the problems you are describing.

However, I do play with Tumbleweed.

There was a problem with virtualbox over the last few days, though I think it was fixed by 20190408.

I have not run into problems with applications showing up in the start menu. But perhaps that only happened with a recent install.

4

I would normally not post about using alternatives, but having had some nasty experiences with Vbox last year, I decided ( suggested by a good openSUSE friend ) to give virt-manager a try. What a relief. Does not depend on kernel modules from external repos / 3rd party packages, just does the job. My friend uses gpu passthrough, which my laptop ( AFAIK ) cannot do, and is exited about the performance of his Win10 VM. For me, I mostly use VM’s for testing purposes ( other distros, new openSUSE versions ), and never looked back at Vbox.

5

Sadly you landed on a bad version of TW wrt VirtualBox. VBox was broken due to some Qt compilation failure, one needed package was mia, another contained the wrong kernel modules. 20190408 is working again though. These are the risks that happen with a bleeding edge rolling distro. TW has been very very good compared to opensuse of the past, but it’s inevitable that this latest-versions factory arrangement breaks from time to time. If you are using TW in a production environment, you should have a backup/restore plan, and a qual process to cover your required applications, this is basic admin stuff.

6

Dear all, thanks for your immediate help!

First, all starters for those applications that I installed myself missing from the Plasma Start Menu:

There is indeed an easy fix for this issue, though hard to find. The solution is to run

kbuildsycoca5

in the terminal on a per-user basis, i.e. when logged in as normal user from a normal konsole, and when logged in as root from his normal konsole. kbuildsycoca5 indeed rebuilds the KMenu, on a deeper level than the corresponding GUI Menu Editor does. It also has a man page. My find comes from the German portion of the openSUSE Forum: https://www.opensuse-forum.de/thread/39200-programme-werden-im-startmen%C3%BC-nicht-angezeigt/?564aa859
Luckily, the starters do stick after running kbuildsycoca5, and - most importantly - installing further applications lets them show up properly.

Second, that nasty VirtualBox mess:

Well, indeed quite an unhappy and nasty experience to just stumble over a flawed TW snapshot to install from. I will seriously consider the mentioned alternative to VirtualBox!

Thus, I just took the pain to scrap the TW installation again, get the 20190409 ISO and start from scratch. (Luckily, during the previous installs, I took complete notes, s.th. I hadn’t done since two years.)

I did also decide now to follow the openSUSE standard installation, which makes the root dir / a btrfs filesystem with snapshots (hope a 100 GiB partition is far bigger than needed), while leaving /home as ext4. I hope this is a good decision now, i.e. that (1) btrfs is really stable on its own, (2) the performance loss is acceptable, and (3) I will get to understand snapper well enough, hopefully before a need for rolling back would arise… In the past, I had not trusted btrfs 200%, based on lots of serious literature available, even very recent textbooks on Linux. So both / and /home were ext4, I had done backups differently, and I had looked at timeshift (thanks, malcolmlewis, sorry, no feedback yet).

7

Why am I using Tumbleweed KDE? And why do I run Manjaro Xfce as my second production operating system? No, I don’t like pain, though it might look like. Thing is I came from Linux Mint, Ubuntu flavors, Leap, Fedora, but I settled on TW first, then Manjaro as my second OS. Both rolling releases are quite well in sync (same version of VirtualBox most of the time, which is required for a Windows VM with Guest Additions installed therein). And I do hate older out-dated software, plus there is some software where the maintainer dismisses any call for help when one isn’t on its latest version…

8

Needless to say, I stay away from VB on TW for the time being. Hope I can trust VB on Manjaro (i.e. Arch) to continue running smoothly.

On the openSUSE Factory mailing list, reports of continued malfunction of VB with TW 20190409 and 20190411 do just pop up…

9

Visit virtualbox forums for the entire show!