F22 unusable - system freezes on login

[Matthew Woehlke]

On 2015-06-18 12:54, Matthew Woehlke wrote:
> I just installed F22 (KDE spin) from scratch on a new Dell M6800. The
> Live CD seemed to run okay, but when I try to boot the installed OS, it
> (almost¹) invariably freezes when I try to log in. The machine is
> effectively unusable as a result.

HEY! Turns out I *really can't log in*!

I managed to persuade the machine to bring the network up on startup,
and *I can't log in remotely either*. Same symptoms; as soon as I try,
the machine locks up. KDM remains more or less responsive, but TTY
switching, which would otherwise work, results in a permanently black
screen.

Oh... and /var/log/messages isn't actually just unhelpful, it's
*corrupt*... both less and vi show a bunch of '^@' special characters
where recent log entries ought to be. I have (many) entries from June 5,
then one or two fragments from June 14 and again from today... but
literally just a few lines, *nothing* like the hundreds of lines I
*should* have from a normal boot-up.

-- 
Matthew