[PLUG] Desperate! Fedora 16 upgrade killed X

[John Jason Jordan]

On Wed, 16 Nov 2011 21:56:30 -0800
"Richard C. Steffens" <rsteff at comcast.net> dijo:

> On 11/16/2011 07:10 PM, John Jason Jordan wrote:
> > On Wed, 16 Nov 2011 17:59:28 -0800
> > John Jason Jordan<johnxj at comcast.net>  dijo:
> >
> >> Probably unrelated but, while at the command line as root, I have no network. I did "ifconfig eth0 up" and then I could see eth0 in the list of interfaces, but I still cannot go anywhere. I can't even ping my printers. I need to fix that as well, else I won't be able to install anything.
> > OK, ifconfig shows only lo, but after I do ifconfig eth0 up and ifconfig wlan0 up the ifconfig command shows them both. However, neither has an IP address. (There are both ethernet and wireless  availabe to the computer.)
> 
> Possibly an undereducated long shot but ...
> 
> Do you get your IP addresses from your router or do you assign static IP 
> addresses? If the former, is there a DHCP client running? (I think 
> that's the right end of the stick.) If not, then wouldn't that mean your 
> system never asks for an IP address?

I finally managed to get the netwrok running, at least via the
wireless. 

Fedora 16 now offers a Grub boot menu like Ubuntu, i.e., there is the
regular boot option and underneath is a Recovery Mode option. When I
didn't get X up with the regular boot option I rebooted and chose
Recovery Mode. That got me to a command line as root. And that is where
I discovered that the network was not working. 

It took quite a learning curve, but I got it connected to the wireless.
To do so I had to learn about wpa_supplicant and I had to create a psk
key. Luckily wpa_supplicant was installed - because I couldn't install
anything without the connection. I also had to delve into forgotten
parts of iwconfig and iwlist, reading lots of man pages and web sites.

And then I discovered that if I let it boot to the GUI, even though X
wouldn't start, I could do Ctrl-Alt-F2 to get to a console, and having
done so the ethernet was working. Why it wasn't working when I booted
to Recovery Mode I do not know. But at least now I have the net.

I still can't get X to come up. The weird error messages I am getting
(and still googling on) are:

	Refusing to touch device with a bound kernel driver
	(EE) open /dev/fb0: No such device
	(EE) Screens found, but none have a usable configuration

It won't come up with vesa, nouveau, or nvidia. All three give the same
error messages as above. That tells me that something fundamental is
wrong, 'cause vesa will run on cardboard and spit. I did discover that
Fedora 16 after the upgrade was not running the right proprietary
nVidia driver, even though it was in the repos. I updated it, but X
still won't come up.

It's late. I'm going to bed. In the morning after coffee I'll have a
much better chance of figuring out what is wrong.