Weirdness with Fedora/XP upgrade

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Mon, 2008-05-26 at 21:25 +0000, Beartooth wrote:
> On Mon, 26 May 2008 13:36:37 -0400, Matthew Saltzman wrote:
> 	[...]
> >> 	Vesa driver? I've seen the word during boot-ups on at least one
> >> machine; but since it means nothing to me, I don't even recall which
> >> machine. I'll be glad to try that or anything else I can; how do I do
> >> it?
> > 
> > I believe you can do this:
> > 
> >         When you see the GRUB splash screen on boot, press a key.  
> 
> 	Did that -- and nothing happened.
> 
> 	The machine was still where it had been, saying it had started 
> the network manager. I hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete, and it went down as far as 
> sending the TERM signal -- and then sat there, without doing anything I 
> could see, but with the machine's light still on.
> 
> 	I hit the reset button. It went as far as the grub menu, and I 
> hit a key. That left it with its F9 line highlighted. I hit e -- and 
> nothing happened. In fact, it didn't respond to anything on the keyboard 
> -- the first time I've ever seen grub do that.
> 
> 	I hit the reset button again, and this time it let me tell it to 
> edit both times. Then it froze again.
> 
> > Select
> >         the top kernel line of the options offered and type 'e', select
> >         the kernel line and type 'e'.  Append 'video=vesa' at the end of
> >         the line.  Type [Enter], type 'b'.
> 
> 	I hit the reset button yet again, and did all the above hastily 
> (but, I hope and believe, accurately) -- getting it all in ahead of 
> another freeze. 
>  
> > Then X should detect your video card as vesa, which is the most generic
> > sort of interface.
> 
> 	It booted, but only into another login line, white on black; I 
> logged in -- and it gave me my prompt, along with a line saying "Can't 
> open display."
>  
> > If the machine boots, you can boot in runlevel 3 (edit the kernel line
> > in GRUB as above, but instead of "video=vesa" add "3".  Then you'll get
> > a virtual console to log into.  Then (as root) run
> > 
> > 	system-config-display --reconfig
> > 
> > and see if that helps.
>  
> 	It tried some sort of traceback, said something cryptic about 
> /usr/share/system-config-display/xconf.py, and (apparently) tried to 
> import something from somewhere. Then it said 
> 
> ImportError: No module named ibmasm
> 
> and gave me my root prompt back.
> 
> 	Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the scp -r that I was running quit 
> with the message 
> 
> scp: error: unexpected filename: ..
> lost connection
> 
> 	So there must be some stuff I didn't get; I don't know what, but 
> I got vast amounts -- enough to run my df up, despite deleting hand over 
> fist, from its original 50% to 78%. (Baobab, which sees only a 35.2 GB 
> drive, makes it 72.8%. I'm pretty sure this machine has a nominal 40 GB 
> drive; I thought the #1 machine had two -- 40 GB for Fedora and 40 GB for 
> XP, just because the one thing I do on it is GPS-compatible topo maps, 
> which are apt to be graphic-intensive and to grow hugely -- but it may be 
> 80 and 80.)
> 
> 	The actual numbers on machine #2 are 
> 
> [btth at hbsk ~]$ df
> Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
> /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
>                       36693560  26814088   7985484  78% /
> /dev/sda1               194442     18754    165649  11% /boot
> tmpfs                   501108        48    501060   1% /dev/shm
> 
> 
> 	The corresponding top line numbers from df on #1 are
>                        73545144  30178956   39570016
> 
> 	Since I haven't even tried to salvage anything from anywhere but 
> my user's home directory, it looks to me like I have very nearly all of 
> it. (I don't keep financial or otherwise critical files on any computer.)
> 
> 	Bottom line: I'll gladly keep this up so long as you, Patrick 
> O'Callaghan in the X thread, or any other clearly knowledgeable person 
> here thinks it worth while. Hey, we might uncover the anaconda bug! But 
> if the worse comes to the worst, I'm confident I can now live with the 
> results of wiping the hard drive and re-installing F8 from scratch.

As in your other thread, I'm inclined to suggest going ahead and doing
that.

I don't actually have a Fedora9 machine handy to make sure every step
works exactly the way I suggested.  Enough X stuff has changed from F8
to F9 that I don't know if I'm a reliable source of advice (if the above
didn't help) until I can get an F9 machine up to try.
-- 
                Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs