Bill Davidsen wrote:
I did an upgrade last night (fc13, x86) to get the security updates, and on the reboot X doesn't come up. I think I've seen this before, but can someone jog my memory what it messed up? And thoughts as to why would be appreciated as well, of course.
end of messages: http://rd.and.net/SJhX3LWZ6
Maybe I should call this one FIXED, because I am not sure how it got broken. After the upgrade my root filesystem was very low on space. Rather than play with sizes (not on LVM) I decided to move the two GB of /usr/share to another partition and mount that.
What I did: - defined another partition on sdb - created a filesystem on it - mounted the new filesystem on /mnt/tmp - copied /usr/share to /mnt/tmp (yes with -r) - checked that the directories were the same - dropped to single user mode - removed (rm /usr/share/*) all the old content - umounted the new filesystem - remounted the new filesystem on /usr/share - got the new filesystem UUID and put in /etc/fstab - rebooted and got no video
Having tried everything else, I used restorecon to restore the labels on the /usr/share filesystem. Rebooted and got video.
I am reasonably sure I used "cp -ra" to copy the files, and if I didn't I would have used rsync with the "a" option which also should copy all the label information.
The clue was an sealert saying that the access was blocked to /usr/share/locale, and I didn't hit on it right away because without X the warning didn't pop up, it wasn't until I thought of selinux blocking some trojan in the update that I checked. No trojan, just a failure in the copy.
I'm unable to produce a failure in either cp or rsync, so I will assume either my typo or this keyboard which has been known to drop a character now and again.
Thanks to the two people who contributed some good thoughts on possible causes, they both proposed workarounds for other possible causes of a problem of this type.