F21: Gnome doesn't work on i686 Dell Laptop

[Max Pyziur]

On Wed, 18 Mar 2015, Chris Murphy wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 5:17 PM, Max Pyziur <pyz at 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.

I installed F21 a month ago, and I've kept up with the updates. So 
whatever kernel that's in use is the latest one.

My attention to this is periodic; but I would like to resolve it so that I 
know that I can install F21 w/ no worries on my two x68_64s, machines on 
which I'm reliant.

I'll try the command line changes that you suggest.

>
>
>>
>> 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.

When I first Installed F21, I just defaulted to whatever was offered on 
the Workstation DVD, making sure that I kept my /home partition.

After that, I did several "groupinstalls" in part hoping to remedy this 
Gnome problem, and also wanting to have Xfce and Mate.

So, in one of those "groupinstalls" I could have also gotten rsyslogd 
installed and running (I can't imagine not having it.).

Max Pyziur
pyz at brama.com