USB Not Working With OpenSUSE 11.0

There are three types of software problems: user-errors, configuration-errors and bugs. A bug occurs when you do everything right and give the correct data but things do not work they way the should. With OpenSUSE, bugs are to be submitted to the Novel bug tracking service. From what I know, the problem gets investigated and you either get a fix or a workaround.

After installing OpenSUSE 11.0, on a machine which ran 10.3 without any USB problems, the USB system did not work. Luckily I had a PS/2 keyboard in a closet which helped me diagnose the problem. USB storage devices did not work either but with a working keyboard it is easier to do something about it. The tip-off that this was a bug rather than a hardware problem is that a dual-boot system would have USB working with OpenSUSE 10.3 but not with 11.0.

After submitting a bug to Novel, it took a few weeks to diagnose the problem and get a work-around. The bug tracking process is easy but not without hick-ups. At one point the bug was closed because someone who experienced USB not working reported that it was his hardware that was faulty. As this was not the case for those experiencing the real problem, I reopened the bug maintaining that USB was working using 10.3 on the same system.

The problem turned out to be a device driver conflict which was eliminated by simply adding snd-hda-intel to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist. Although this solution is extremely simple, it took a good amount of time to diagnose.