FC10 very borked

[Arith]

Greetings. First off, sorry if I got the wrong forum. At this point I'm so frustrated that I'm about ready to nuke FC alltogether.. but .. this is my last stab at the cat. I have looked around, and some of my points have been addressed, but due to certain circumstances I can't perform any of the solutions I've come across.

Anyway. In short, FC10 -LOVES- to lock up. Let me regale you with the tale of my adventure;

Out of the box, FC would halt. I reasoned it was the wifi drivers, as it would freeze 5-10 mins after boot and use of wifi. I went hardwired and it seemed to solve the issue.. for the time. Now, I went to do some updates, but the update would just.. stop. The OS wasn't frozen, but the updater was doing jack squat. I was recommended by a more linux savvy friend to focus on getting the new kernel. I managed to do that through the package manager. That's the only thing that went my way.

I go to get the rest of the 300 some updates.. and package manager complains that NetworkManager can't verify a key of sorts. (I can't recall the exact message) but basically I found out that a possible fix is to go into yum and do updates there. Alright, seems reasonable. Except that FC10 locks up if I use yum at the command line -- without fail. Doesn't seem to stop at a particular file either. I've tried to yum clean.. no effect.

Now, I'm not a very experienced Linux user. I have some experience, but quite rusty. On that note, I tried manually finding NetworkManager and doing it that way. Let me just say, I really REAAAALY hate hunting for dependencies. Especially when they contradict themselves, which is what happened here. I forget specific file names, but essentially Package 1 was dependant on package 2, and when I went to install package 2, it said it was dependant on package 1... what a mess.

Another thing I noticed was if I dragged a window for long enough, that ALSO causes a lockup. To add insult to injury, this is actually the second time writing this post. Yeah, it locked up JUST as I was signing my name. Several loud explicatives and a reboot to my XP partition allowed me to post the one you see before you.

For the record.. I love linux.. but EVERY time I try it (not just this distro) it completely takes a dump on my forehead. Different machines, different distros, same crap. I can't quite explain it. Forgive me, for I am quite frustrated as before mentioned.

In case this is useful, here is my machine specs.

Acer Aspire 3050-1092
Sempron 3500+
WD 320gb (20gb part for linux, 1gb swap)
2GB ram (256 for shared video)
Radeon xpress 1100
Atheros 5007EG wireless

Any other information I can provide, let me know. Again, I'm fairly green, so be gentle.

Thanks

Jim

[AdamW]

I can at least say that the problem with the signature of the NetworkManager update package is known and will be resolved soon. yum hanging if you run it sounds bad, though. Are you sure the hardware in the machine is OK? Do other OSes run OK?

[Arith]

Yeah, the hardware is fine. Laptop isn't any older than 2 years. I've had XP working on here before I had FC10. XP continues to work flawlessly. One thing I am working on (probably a dead end.. alas) I've been selectively updating packages using package manager.. things like yum, graphic drivers.. anything but network manager. I'll post if I have any success.

Thanks

[JEO]

I had frequent lockups in F10 due to the buggy kernel modesetting drivers (specifically radeon driver). Try adding the keyword nomodeset to the end of the kernel command line in /boot/grub/grub.conf and see if it stops your lockup problem. It did mine.

[Arith]

I seem to have made headway. I updated yum as mentioned in my previous post, then went to terminal and did
yum update --nogpgcheck --skip-broken
actually worked.
Wireless is still really dodgy (I managed to ping google about three times then.. nothing) however hardwired works. I know there's no local interference .. the router is about 4 feet away, and is working wirelessly just fine in XP.
None the less, it's been several minutes, and none of the triggers have caused a halt.. hell I even enabled desktop effects, and amused myself with jello windows and still no haltedness.

If anyone has an idea about the dodgy wifi, please let me know. Otherwise I'd like to thank Adam and JEO for your help. The nomodeset may also have something to do with it, but to that extent I can't be sure.

Perhaps finally I can enjoy an Linux distro (relitively) headache free.

Thanks again.

[AdamW]

If the wifi is using the rather new ath5k driver, you could try the old madwifi driver instead (I think rpmfusion has it). If it's using ath9k, you can't, as madwifi never supported those chips.

You could try ndiswrapper instead of a native driver in either case, though. It's not usually a bad option for hardware where the native driver has trouble.

[arthurhanlon]

Originally Posted by Arith

.. but .. this is my last stab at the cat.

I wouldn't be stabbing any cats yet

Anyway, back to the point. I have an Acer Aspire One that used to use the ath5k driver and mine was they same, no lockups though, but was very unreliable. I also read about the madwifi driver and since I installed that, the wireless works fine apart from the fact that if I log in too fast I get no wireless and am forced to log out and back in to get net access.

So I guess I am just really confirming what AdamW has already suggested.

Let us know how you get on though.
Arthur