On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 5:17 PM, Max Pyziur pyz@brama.com wrote:
Recently, I "fresh installed" F21 on a Dell i686 Inspiron Laptop.
I had been running F18 on it, and just wanted to jump to the newest release w/o stepping through F19 and F20. I kept the /home partition, and wiped everything else out.
Xfce and Mate Desktops start and are very functional.
Any variant of Gnome (new version and Classic) reports an equivalent screen-of-death with the message reading "A problem has occurred, and the system can't recover."
I have a Dell Latitude D600 circa ~2002, also i686. It's just a dog with Gnome Shell. I don't depend on this for production use, so I'm just running Fedora Server on it mainly and to test i686 stuff for QA. Xfce is much more realistic to use.
What happens if you boot with boot parameter nomodeset? Another possibility is to add boot parameter 3, to boot in runlevel 3/multi-user.target/no graphical boot. Then do a yum upgrade right away. There's a much newer kernel, and hence video drivers, now than when Fedora 21 shipped as well as a lot of gnome updates that could be related. After the upgrade, reboot normally and see if the problem is solved.
The /var/log/messages file is very extensive;
Fedora 21 Workstation doesn't come with rsyslogd, so there shoudn't be a /var/log/messages. Fedora 21 Server does.