Can't boot after update, possible NVidia problem

[Lo Zeno]

I am quite desperate at the moment...

I am not a Linux newbie, but I am still quite unexperienced, so I'll appreciate any detailed help. I have Fedora10 installed on my laptop (an HP Pavillion with NVidia 9200 graphics card and broadcom wireless card), this morning (that is, half an hour ago) I installed MonoDevelop using YumEX . After installation, I noticed the familiar pop-up message warning me that there were 4 updates available: 2 of them, were metadata for NVidia (something that tracks which version is in use).

I started the update, and after that I rebooted.
Now, during boot I see a FAILED message and a WARNING: apparently, during boot it seems unable to build and activate the new NVidia package, and after starting up avahi the screen simply blinks and I get the blinking cursor.

If I try to boot the older kernel, I get 2 warnings stating that there is no NVidia package for this kernel, I get to the login screen and apparently I can log into my account. Unfortunately, doing so turns my screen completely white... and I can't do anything.
I haven't set any other account, too, and it seems like I can't log into root (out of curiosity: in Fedora 9 I could log in as root by typing "root" as username and the root password as password in the login form... why can't I do it in Fedora 10?).

Any help is really appreciated, since the GTK# project I was working on Mono is quite urgent. I really wish I do not need to reinstall Fedora from scratch again...

[Lo Zeno]

an update:
I just tried booting in runlevel 3 and do a full yum update, I received several error messages. Apparently, both kmod-nvidia and kmod-wl miss some dependencies on specific versions of kernel-uname-r.

The only repository I have installed beyond the Fedora ones are RPMFusion and Skype.

Can anybody point me to a solution?

[hartl_vienna]

I have the same problem. It´s really annoying.

[Lo Zeno]

Okay, seems like I managed to make it work again.
I'm not sure that I "guessed right" about the reason for this malfunction, but this is what I did:

I'm not a total Linux noob, but I have always been "pampered" by using graphical environments and not CLI. I do use the terminal quite often, but always inside Gnome, so I panicked when I realized that I did not know how to enter Linux in text-mode. Anyway, after discovering how to enable userlevel3, I also discovered in an old RedHat forum that this kind of problems happen when a repository adds updates for some software that requires the latest version of the kernel, and the main repository doesn't update that very version of the kernel. In short, I had updated my kmods (from rpmFusion) to a version that needed a kernel that wasn't still available (on fedora main repos).

Kinda silly, since one uses repositories to avoid this very kind of dependency problems, but anyway...

I waited one full day, to make sure that repos were aligned again. Then, logged in with userlevel3, and with yum uninstalled compiz-gnome and nvidia drivers. Rebooted, and tried runlevel5.

I could once again use gnome, but every window lacked the "frame" around it. This means that I couldn't minimize, maximize, or close any window... and resolution was reduced. The last could be because I didn't have nvidia drivers anymore, the first maybe because of missing compiz? Anyway, as long as I could click File->Close or File->Exit it was still usable.
I opened YumEX, and installed once again Nvidia and compiz. Rebooted, and everything was fine once again.

Reluctantly I have made a full update... but this time everything was A-OK.

Now, I didn't lose any data and everything is OK, but... I want to know (in an effort to best myself), could I avoid all this trouble? Was there a quicker way to do it? If so, what was it?
Just to improve my knowledge about Linux.

[AdamW]

I'd recommend installing akmod-nvidia , as a fallback. When you have that installed, if you get to a point where you're booting a kernel for which you have no kmod-nvidia package, the driver will be automatically compiled from the source in the akmod-nvidia package. (It's similar to DKMS, if you know that system - Mandriva uses it). So you shouldn't have this problem again.

The basic problem is that RPM Fusion is a separate repo run by a separate team, so it's basically impossible for them to synchronize exactly so that updated packages show up in RPM Fusion's repos at the exact time the updated kernel becomes available through the official Fedora repos.