Fedora 16 Upgrade Disaster

[AdamW]

always remember the Common Bugs page, folks

another issue that can cause this same symptom (GNOME's fail whale screen after an f15->f16 upgrade) is:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Commo...-profile-gnome

the explanation and fix are there.

[markdk]

I had the same issue with a gnome desktop after preupgrade, fortunately I had the KDE desktop as well.

I think the relabel suggestion above is what fixed the issue for me.

I resolved by
yum distro-sync (yes it does downgrade packages as mentioned above)
cd ~myuserid
rm -rf .gnome* .gconf* .compiz*
system-config-selinux and change to permisive and relabel and reboot, and reboot

I could them log in with gnome

system-config-selinux and change back to enforcing and relabel on reboot, and reboot

And I could still login with gnome.

So I think the relabel is what probably did the trick, so try that first.

[bbehnam]

always remember the Common Bugs page, folks

another issue that can cause this same symptom (GNOME's fail whale screen after an f15->f16 upgrade) is:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Commo...-profile-gnome

the explanation and fix are there.

I did read it William,

Thank you for the suggestion.

The only thing it says is:

"... you may not be able to log in to GNOME Shell with SELinux enabled. Login will fail with the "Oh no! Something has gone wrong" error screen that GNOME pops up if a component is crashing repeatedly. "

"

It further states that to fix the problem login to console or another desktop and run the command:

"...To resolve the issue, boot to a different desktop or to a console and run the command restorecon -r ~/.local/share/icc. After doing this, GNOME login should work correctly. "

The "~" implies a user home directory. The people who are having our problem don't get as far as the login screen. So there is no user directory in play at the moment of the problem. No login event has occured. We are not getting to the authentication screen.

I suspect that selinux is indeed the culprit.

Thanks anyway. We can tick another thing off I guess.

---------- Post added at 12:15 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:04 AM ----------

I think this problem is related to selinux and its policies regarding nvidia. You can now either wait for the update to selinux-policy-3.10.0-55 or temporarily set selinux to permissive mode (edit /etc/selinux/config), which has resolved the problem for me.

As soon as the update happens, though, I'd recommend resetting selinux to enforce mode or use setenforce 1 as soon as the system has passed gdm. Better yet: use the NVIDIA installation guide MrMarcus has posted down below to install the selinux updates directly from koji.

**** WARNING *****

DOING THIS CAUSED MY SYSTEM TO BE UNBOOTALBLE. It would freeze with an error that ended with:

... Failed to load selinux policy. Freezing.

To resolve the issue you have to pass the parameter selinux=0 to the kernel at boot time manually.

On the plus side doing this (selinux=0) will make gnome login function again?!

The system is very sluggish though. Not sure what's happening :P

[leigh123linux]

I did read it William,

Thank you for the suggestion.

The only thing it says is:

"... you may not be able to log in to GNOME Shell with SELinux enabled. Login will fail with the "Oh no! Something has gone wrong" error screen that GNOME pops up if a component is crashing repeatedly. "

"

It further states that to fix the problem login to console or another desktop and run the command:

"...To resolve the issue, boot to a different desktop or to a console and run the command restorecon -r ~/.local/share/icc. After doing this, GNOME login should work correctly. "

The "~" implies a user home directory. The people who are having our problem don't get as far as the login screen. So there is no user directory in play at the moment of the problem. No login event has occured. We are not getting to the authentication screen.

I suspect that selinux is indeed the culprit.

Thanks anyway. We can tick another thing off I guess.

---------- Post added at 12:15 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:04 AM ----------



**** WARNING *****

DOING THIS CAUSED MY SYSTEM TO BE UNBOOTALBLE. It would freeze with an error that ended with:

... Failed to load selinux policy. Freezing.

To resolve the issue you have to pass the parameter selinux=0 to the kernel at boot time manually.

On the plus side doing this (selinux=0) will make gnome login function again?!

The system is very sluggish though. Not sure what's happening :P

LOL, sounds more like a PICNIC to me.

[oseeeo]

Hello everybody.

I've try to install the Fedora 16 version but I've the same problem with the computer unhappy.
But I've not make an upgrade from the 15 version. I've downloaded the gnome x64 version cd and format my hdd.
I don't know if the problem will be the same with KDE, XFCE or LXDE.
I've see in some posts that the extensions may cause the problem. With new installation, does I have some extensions ?

[bbehnam]

Yep Lots of bugs, and creepy crawlies =)

But fun anyway

[AdamW]

bbehnam: from what I read, I don't think everyone is hitting the same issue. Some are getting the fail whale when trying to log in.

[ryptyde]

bbehnam: from what I read, I don't think everyone is hitting the same issue. Some are getting the fail whale when trying to log in.

I did the "preupgrade" from a usb flash drive with the DVD.iso. I ran into a
couple of glitches and the "OH! NO!" one too that wouldn't let me login so I
rebooted and at the grub screen navigated to the kernel line and at the end
put "autorelabel" without the quotes. Took a while to relabel so be patient and
that straightened out my login problem. I have had this happen with F15 before.

I am getting ready to run preupgrade on another netbook as the first one was so much fun.

phil

[bbehnam]

[This issue has been SOLVED (for me):

The problem was definitely selinux. Updating and relabeling did the trick.

There are still issues. The gnome shell is really slow. I'm moving on to the performance aspects.

Those are:

1- Slow Firefox.
2- Slow Gnome Shell response.

I suspect this service that is called "tracker:" that is installed and enabled by default. They have some creepy big-brother-esque names:

tracker-store <-Store what's been tracked? To do what with it?
tracker-miner-fs <-- Mine my filesystem? Why? To do what with it?
tracker-miner-flickr <-- Mine-Flickr, or for flicker?! Why? Who says I want to, or want you to? For what purpose?

Not sure about the exact functionality. But together they are using more than 100% of the total cpu, and more than 1.5GB of RAM?! Doing who knows what. I will make a new topic for that; since it is unrelated to the current issues

[Salamandra]

I have observed that firefox is very slow at times, specially when opens the search results in this forum, it freezes video but the mouse pointer works.

I am usin XFCE with compiz, it happens the same with midori, and using xfce windows manager instead of compiz.

[Mariusz W]

Exactly the same problem here; however, I can login using KDE. I tried reinstalling GNOME, but got the same result. GNOME is my preferred desktop, so I'd like to fix this problem. Does anyone know of a solution?

Reboot and see what happens.

I ran into exact same symptoms after preupgrading from Fedora 15 a vanilla (i.e. no Gnome "extensions", no risky customizations, no Nvidia drivers, etc.) installation on a Toshiba netbook.

Repeated attempts to log in were all unsuccessful invariably ending with the same message that was quoted several times in this thread.

Instead of panicking, or rushing to search the internet for a solution, I quietly rebooted machine: this brought me again to the GDM screen, and this time I logged in without a problem. It went away on its own.

At the moment I am in the process of performing the first yum update on that netbook while typing this message on another, brand new notebook that has everything already prepared for installing Fedora 16.

(I just noticed that the yum update completed successfully.)

[mikeym]

I'm moving on to the performance aspects.

Those are:

1- Slow Firefox.
2- Slow Gnome Shell response.

I suspect this service that is called "tracker:" that is installed and enabled by default. They have some creepy big-brother-esque names:

I'm finding that the whole of Gnome shell is sluggish and unresponsive as long as I have Firefox running. It speeds right back up when I close it.

I might start a seperate thread.

[AdamW]

tracker is just a desktop search system, it's nothing scary. you can disable it if you don't want desktop search.

[epreble]

Still working the same problems. Pre-upgrade seemed to work but then got the same error. Connected a second monitor - one had the message, the second was operational. Hidden under the error message was the message that the error related to the NotificationArea:Applet:Notification. Additionally, all the pre-upgrade directory/folders are still present in /boot.
Have some package orphans to remove, but really am not sure of the next step as apparently the preupgrade did not finish. Printer services etc are not available.
System is Win7/Fedora dual boot, and just modified the windows startup originally (Fedora 12) to dual boot instead of grub. But as probably will not upgrade Windows again, didn't matter so when Fedora16 preupgrade installed grub (grub2) in mbr but in a bit of a mess overall.
F16 is running - and even with the error message, once I start something like configuration - it works over the error message - but do want to find a way to correct this mess.

[stieg]

Hit the same issue upgrading from F15 to F16 using preupgrade. I have Intel graphics and SElinux is set to permissive so my issue was not related to NVidia or SElinux.

Anyway I managed to fix the issue by doing the following as root

systemctl stop prefdm.service
yum reinstall gnome-desktop
yum reinstall gnome-shell
systemctl start prefdm.service

After that I was able to login and get back to work. That may or may not work for you but that is what did the trick for me . Hope that helps you all.