"Oh no! Something has gone wrong" after update to FC17

[Doug Hutcheson]

Three days ago, I upgraded from Fedora 15 to 16. At that time, I had problems with the "Oh, no! ..." dialog appearing when I logged in. In response to this question, I installed gnome-shell-extension-noripple and the problem went away.

Today, I upgraded to Fedora 17 and the problem has reappeared. I installed the gnome shell extension again, but the problem remains. As before, I can find no log or trace to help me figure out what has gone wrong.

Any help would be gratefully received.

[Doug Hutcheson]

I found how to switch the shell extension on, under Advanced Settings/Shell Extensions. It had been 'Off', so I switched it 'On', but this seems to have made things marginally worse, in that I now have to try three or more times to get a working session. It does eventually come right, but I have found other apparent instabilities, such as the system hanging, or display flashing, when I move the cursor to the top left corner. I am going to backup my work, then repave the machine with FC17, instead of sticking with the upgrade from FC16, to see if the problems go away. If not, I will repave with FC16, as that seemed to be stable for the couple of days I had it running.

[chris2kari]

Originally Posted by Doug Hutcheson

I found how to switch the shell extension on, under Advanced Settings/Shell Extensions. It had been 'Off', so I switched it 'On', but this seems to have made things marginally worse, in that I now have to try three or more times to get a working session. It does eventually come right, but I have found other apparent instabilities, such as the system hanging, or display flashing, when I move the cursor to the top left corner. I am going to backup my work, then repave the machine with FC17, instead of sticking with the upgrade from FC16, to see if the problems go away. If not, I will repave with FC16, as that seemed to be stable for the couple of days I had it running.

If you want F17 its probably waaaay overdue for you to back up your data, do a clean install of F17 & 20 minutes later you have a clean stable environment to work forward from. You will find hundreds of megabytes of post F17 bugfixes waiting for you in software update. (hint hint)

After a lot of trialing I have settled on F17. Stable well designed and documented distro with big repo's of up to date packages. Only one layer of bureaucracy between you and the original package software authors. Fedora contributes a lot of software to the community. I trialled all the Ubuntu flavours, they worked ok but I feel there is too many layers of hands on the code. Deban patches and modifications then Ubuntu patches and modifications on top of those. Also I found the ubuntu repos to be big but older packages). Ubuntu contributes very little code to the community.

Chris

[Doug Hutcheson]

Hi Chris. I agree, a clean install seems to be on my horizon. When I updated from FC16 to FC17, there was 1.2Gb of updates to grind through. Fortunately, I have good backups.

I have been using Fedora for many years, back from when it was still called Red Hat. Never found a reason to abandon ship and my support questions, to Fedora Forum and Linux Questions, have generally been answered promptly. The volunteer support bases are very helpful and evenBugzilla posts are responded to in a timely manner. Puts a lot of commercial support services to shame.

[fcfan]

Clean install to a kvm virtual machine, using physical not logical vols. Got the "Oh no..." reboot to recovery, tried startx, got "Oh no..." Starting X by itself worked. Updated all the packages, same problem with new kernel. In recovery, added an xterm, and got initx to work (same problem with startx). disabled SELinux, and startx works in recovery mode, but regular boots still result in "oh no...". Bogus failure is apparently with dbus permissions, MTRR error,... It's not X, which always starts. Added only fvwm and ddd packages after the xterm, so it's a pretty default installation.

[Doug Hutcheson]

Raised this as a bug: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=837722