F17 - no network

[David A. De Graaf]

Upon first boot after a fresh installation, there's no network; 
no way to continue the installation, to say nothing of useability.

Running lsmod, I see only 4 modules are loaded, in contrast with the
80 or 90 that are customary.  Neither the ath9k family, needed for my
wireless radio, nor r8169 for my ethernet device are loaded.
These modules are present in /lib/modules.
A manual   insmod ath9k   fails, saying 
  Error: could not load module ath9k: No such file or directory

ath9k.ko is plainly present in the customary place.

I have, rather hysterically, added insmod lines to /etc/grub2/grub.cfg
but these had no effect.

Running    grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg   nearly wiped me
out because grub2-mkconfig is braindead concerning UUIDs and 
rd.luks.uuid values.  It put in totally wrong values for F16,
resulting in booting the defective F17 no matter what I chose. 
I was able to reconstruct correct values and can once again boot the
old F16 system, but I almost lost the whole thing.

This was a fresh install from a USB stick to a new root partition,
keeping the old /boot and /home and old /f16 partitions intact.  
On this netbook all partitions except /boot are encrypted.
As in the past, I boot with rhgb removed, noselinux added to boot
options, and use multi-user.target to emulate init level 3.
I chose XFCE and unchecked Gnome during installation.

On first boot I tried to edit the grub kernel line but couldn't.
One must now use "simple emacs commands" to do so.  I have spent
four decades avoiding emacs and becoming good with vi - the STANDARD
editor.

The reboot, shutdown, halt commands are now guaranteed to hang the system.
Only a forced power-off will recover.  That's just sad.

F17 seems totally hosed and useless.  
Why are essential modules not being loaded? 
Does anyone have an idea how to dig out?
I'm leaving for a trip in three days and need this netbook to work.

-- 
        David A. De Graaf    DATIX, Inc.    Hendersonville, NC
        dad at datix.us         www.datix.us


"Flint must be an extremely wealthy town: I see that each of you
bought two or three seats."
        -Victor Borge, playing to a half-filled house in Flint, Mich.