F17 to F18 via FedUp: All tty output seems broken

[PTrenholme]

I used FedUp to upgrade an old Dell Inspiron 8600 laptop (2Gb RAM, 500Gb SATA) from F17 to F18. FedUp seemed to work fine, but, after the final process finished, and I tried to reboot using the new 3.7 kernel from the GRUB2 menu (which works as expected), all I could see was a white screen with a few thin vertical lines.

When I rebooted using one of the F17 kernels that FedUp hadn't removed, the X-server did not start. However, the normal boot messages (I don't use the rhgb linux-line option.) were displayed, but the X-server failed to start.

It that point, I could do a Ctrl-Alt-F2 (etc.) to start another TTY, and, from there, the usual startx could be used to run the X-server.

So I thought that my problem was a bug in the 3.7.2-201 kernel. But then the 3.7.2-204 kernel was released, and it didn't fix the problem.

After that disappointment I thought to download the KDE spin LiveCD. I burned it to a disk, and booted it. The live CD booted, but it also failed to start the X-server. However, the screen wasn't clobbered, so I copied the 3.6.10-4 kernel files from the LiveCD iso file to the /boot directory, ran grub2-mkconfig, and tried to boot using that kernel.

No joy.

O.K., maybe it's dracut. No, I was using the initramfs from the LiveCD, and the LiveCD display worked.

Since then, I've been playing around with the /etc/vconsole.conf settings, but I can't seem to find any one that makes a difference.

Oh, I did a full yum upgrade and, as of today, everything is current.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

[PTrenholme]

I think I may have found the problem: the newer xorg-x11-dvr-nouveau module posts a warning message that it has an "unknown input clock freq," and the messed-up display I'm seeing certainly looks like a clock problem.

I'v entered a bug report for the driver.

Hum: I wonder if I could use a Modeline setting in xorg.conf to fix this.

<edit>
Tried that, and also a video=1280x800M@60 on the boot command line (which is what the laptop uses), but no joy.

Oh, the Modline settings in xorg.conf work with no problem using the F17 kernel, so I know I got that right.
</edit>

[pnelsonsr]

While I can start x-server and run gnome desktop. I have been seeing some of my cron.daily cron jobs barffing out saying

sudo: sorry, you must have a tty to run sudo

[PTrenholme]

Well, I've now found a partial work around:

I added the nomodeset option to the linux boot line in grub.cfg and switched to the nv video driver. Actually, I used this in my /etc/defaults/grub file:

GRUB_TIMEOUT=5
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR="$(gawk '/release/{print $1 " " $3;f=1}END{if(!f)print "Unspecified"}' /etc/system-release)"
GRUB_DEFAULT=saved
GRUB_SAVEDEFAULT=true
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="rd.md=0 rd.lvm=0 rd.dm=0 rd.floppy=0 rd.luks=0 LANG=en_US quiet nomodeset vconsole.keymap=us"

and ran grub2-mkconfig

And I have this in my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file:

Section "Device"
        Option      "IgnoreEDID"  "true"
        Option      "RenderAccel" "true"
        Option      "VGAAccess"   "true"
        Option      "DRI"         "true"
        Identifier  "Device0"
        Driver      "nv"
        BusID       "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

The "partial" in the first line of this comment is because the VGA terminal output (that doesn't go though the X-server) is still messed up in every 3.7 kernel I've tried, but it's fine in the 3.6 kernels.