Suse will not boot up fully on HP Pavilion after install
 

Hi everyone
I am hoping that someone will be able to help me with my situation. I previously sought help on installing Suse 10.0 with the laptop screen going blank early on in the installation. I somehow wnet past that phase by mentioning vga=normal, ACPI disabled and finally linux noapic. The install went on okay but during the initial reboot after the installation, when I chose the boot from hard disk option, the boot process stalled with the 'Probing PCI devices' phase. I then reinserted the Suse 10.0 CD1 and picked 'Boot the Installed System Option and then the system comes up with KDE. However the Realtek network adapter is not recognized and I am not sure how to set this up.

Also, I thought that the root user was set up by default and only set up a user without a root. Now I do not seem to have any root privileges at all. How can I set up root priveleges?


When I boot up the installed system using the CD, there seems to be a brief line that says something about a configuration file or something. I am not sure what this is about.


I cannot access Yast or SaX2 because root is not set up. Through all this I do seem to be able to dual-boot Windows XP. But I am also unable to open any programs in Windows XP after the installation. I had to repair Windows XP using the Operating System CD.

Anybody who can help me with all this, a million thanks!!!
preeth26

Which HP Pavilion model? I am running OpenSuSE 10 on a hp pavilion zv5000, and didn't run into the problems you did.
Check out your exact model in the HCL list of this site, of the SuSE site, and try google.

Did you enter a root password during the installaton. If not, there are instructions on this site on how to reset the root password. It involves booting up in rescue mode, editing the /etc/shadow file to removing the encoded password for the root user, by removing the characters between the first two colons. Then you can boot up, su to root (no password now) and using the "passwd" command to create a new password.

It is normal not to have an icon for root to show up in the icon screen. You want to open up a console program, such as "konsole" and use the su command to become root temporarily. You can also use the "kdesu" program to start a kde program, such as kate, as root. I would recommend that you set up sudo. You use the "visudo" program to do that. The file is well commented. There is a line like this, initially:
# Uncomment to allow people in group wheel to run all commands
# %wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL

Move the cursor to the '#' character in the '# %wheel' line and press the 'x' key to delete it. Then press wq to save and quit. Then you need to make yourself a member of the 'wheel' group. This can be done in yast.

You can find information on your NIC card with the "lspci" command. First enter "lspci -v" to list information about your pci devices. On my computer the relevent section looks like this:
02:01.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)
Subsystem: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RT8139
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 185
I/O ports at 7000 [size=256]
Memory at 00000000e0108800 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=256]
Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2

I like to use: lspci -v | sed -n '/Realtek/,/^$/p'
to display just the Realtek section. Note the 02:01.0 on the beginning of the first line.
Now using the command: lspci -n | grep '02:01.0'
02:01.0 Class 0200: 10ec:8139 (rev 10)

I have the uniq identifier for the controller of this NIC device: '10ec:8139 (rev 10)'. This number will be used in HCL lists. Incidently, if your pavilion uses the same device, my laptop is using the '8139too' kernel module. In that case you might try modprobing:
modprobe 8139too
Using grep for this string reveals:
preload.d/boot:stat /lib/modules/@KERNEL_VERSION@/kernel/drivers/net/8139too.ko
sysconfig/hardware/hwcfg-bus-pci-0000:02:01.0:MODULE='8139too'

Sometimes running YaST's hardware information will help things, as your hardware will be re-probed. The problem might have to do with the kernel boot parameters. If you are booting with the 'noacpi' option, you may not be sharing interupts. You probably want to keep the NOAPIC option unless you have more than one processor.

Here two lines from my /boot/grub/menu.lst file.
kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/hda6 vga=0x317 selinux=0 resume=/dev/hda2 splash=silent showopts
initrd /initrd

I hope this is enough information to get you going. Given the number of problems at the start, I think I would cheat and try re-installing. Try not using the 'noapci' option this time.

Sometimes, if the hardware probing fails, you need to blacklist the module causing the problem. If it fails probing the 8139 controller, maybe you need to blacklist the 8139cp driver, for instance. The /etc/modprobe.d/prism2 file has 8 blacklist entries.

Also, check the logs. Paraphrased: Luke, Check the Logs, Luke!
check the /var/log/boot.msg and /var/log/messages and the output of the 'dmesg' command. What is the last entry before the hang. Be carefull though. During bootup, the kernel may be doing several things in parallel.

Oh Boy! Look what this Pr*ck is doing!
Feb 11 02:13:02 hpamd64 sshd[26459]: Invalid user ircop from 216.180.225.26
Feb 11 02:13:03 hpamd64 sshd[26461]: Invalid user work from 216.180.225.26
Feb 11 02:13:03 hpamd64 sshd[26463]: Invalid user pico from 216.180.225.26
Feb 11 02:13:04 hpamd64 sshd[26465]: Invalid user mcedit from 216.180.225.26
Feb 11 02:13:05 hpamd64 sshd[26467]: Invalid user edit from 216.180.225.26
Feb 11 02:13:05 hpamd64 sshd[26469]: Invalid user tgz from 216.180.225.26
Excuse me a moment, time to change the 'yast2 firewall' settings.

.........

Hope this helps.

Hi there
Thank you so much for that fantastic reply. At the very least it is a fantastic learning experience for me. I actually spent a lot of time yesterday, first reinstalling Windows XP, wiping out the Linux installation and reinstalling from scratch. Everything went through like a dream and the experience of using 64 bit is simply awesome. I had absolutely no problems at all. Incidentally, I am using a HP Pavilion dv 5000. As a relative novice, I cannot believe that the 64 bit version is so fast, even when compared to the Windows xp that coexists on the same computer!!!

I have not figured out how to enable 3D. To be honest I am not even sure what the difference is between 3D being enabled and what I have now. But I do understand from various posts that it requires some special steps, otherwise it does not get enabled by default. How do I go about this? Also, any help on enabling the Broadcom wireless card will also be greatly appreciated!

Thanks again for your reply, I will read it a few times just for the learning...
Regards
preeth26

If your computer uses an Nvidia chip, it is presently using the "nv" driver. When you perform an online update, one of the selections will be for the "nvidia" driver. This is the accelerated driver. One downer though is that this driver isn't compatible with the extended features of X-windows, such as transparency. At least it fails for me.