F22 unusable - system freezes on login

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Mon, 22 Jun 2015 12:16:09 -0400
Matthew Woehlke <mwoehlke.floss at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 2015-06-20 06:38, Tim wrote:
> > Allegedly, on or about 19 June 2015, Matthew Woehlke sent:
> >> Remember, I *can't log in*. Not via kdm, not in a TTY, not over
> >> ssh, *not at all*. No login --> never even tries to start X (not
> >> as my user, anyway).
> >>
> >>
> >> (Hrm... on that note, it's interesting to note that the one and
> >> only GUI program I was able to try to run is Konsole...
> > 
> > I have to ask:  If you were unable to login, how were you able to
> > run anything (such as Konsole)?
> 
> *Once and only once* I was able to get a desktop session, which
> allowed me to *try*, unsuccessfully, to run Konsole. (IIRC this was
> on the second attempt; the first had already failed in the manner
> that I'm now seeing always, and I was intending to run updates.)

Hardware failure?

"Gambling behavior" of the machine usually points to faulty hardware.

If the same set of steps don't work and then start working and then
don't work again, I am thinking memory or the harddrive. Boot from a
live image, do a memcheck and do a fsck on all partitions. Does the
machine work reliably under the live image? 

If there are no glitches with the live image, memory is probably ok,
and the most likely culprit is the harddrive. Most system files seem to
be intact because the system boots, but as soon as you try to
login, the system tries to access (either to read or to write)
something additional on the disk, and fails too badly to be able to
recover. For example, I don't really know if the system can recover
from a corrupt /etc/shadow, or something like that.

Also, just for completeness, what is your video hardware? I've seen
cases of the nouveau driver failing so badly that it locks up the
machine in ways you could never expect (like in the middle of a TTY
session, etc.).

Another stab in the dark is CPU temperature --- is the machine maybe
overheating? Does the cpu fan work? Does it sound normal? Are any parts
of the machine unusually hot to touch?

As a side note, AFAIK now sshd is disabled on fresh installs. Do a
"systemctl enable sshd" and "systemctl start sshd" (and verify with
"systemctl status sshd"), and retry to log in over the network. I doubt
it will work, but it's worth a try.

HTH, :-)
Marko