Day 1

Fedora 16 hit the streets on Tuesday of this week. (November 8, 2011).

I immediately rushed out to do a test upgrade on one of my old PC’s running Fedora 15. Initially I used preupgrade to do it all via download, but I was met with the above screen when the machine booted. This was what I got when I should have seen a login prompt. Some people see this after they log in and that probably indicates other issues.

This is not a very informative message! I googled quite a bit, examined the logs in /var/log/gdm/ and pretty much came up empty until I hit the following thread entitled “Fedora 16 Upgrade Disaster”. Wow I thought, this sound promising!

http://fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=271999&page=2

The issue turned out to be selinux — the silent killer and breaker of linux systems. I run nvidia graphics hardware and it appears to be a conflict between the selinux access policies and parts of the nvidia driver.

The fix for the moment is to run the following for commands as root:

yum remove selinux-policy selinux-policy-targeted

yum update libsepol

yum --nogpgcheck install libsepol http://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/packages/selinux-policy/3.10.0/55.fc16/noarch/selinux-policy-3.10.0-55.fc16.noarch.rpm --enablerepo=u*g

yum --nogpgcheck install http://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/packages/selinux-policy/3.10.0/55.fc16/noarch/selinux-policy-targeted-3.10.0-55.fc16.noarch.rpm --enablerepo=u*g

Long term, I hope this will get fixed by default. It seems to be killing a lot of folks upgrade dreams. I’m posting here in hopes that it helps someone out. Let me know if you find out any further updates to the problem.

Day 2

I should mention that after seeing this message initially and not finding a solution, I downloaded the install DVD and installed from scratch. The problem went away — so this appears to be more of an issue for people doing an upgrade from a previous version of Fedora and not a problem for people doing a fresh install from scratch.

Day 3

More problems with my system that was upgraded from Fedora 15 -> 16. I can’t burn DVD’s with it. I can insert a blank disk and it shows up in the file manager, but when I attempt to write an iso image to it, the dialog box claims it can’t find a valid disk to write to. My system that has Fedora 16 installed from scratch does not have this problem, it can write DVD’s just fine. More selinux problems? I will stash all the data on this upgraded system and do an install from scratch to see if that cures my login problems and my dvd writing problems.

Summary

Upgrading to Fedora 16 from a previous version of Fedora seems to lead to problems! Installing Fedora 16 from scratch seems to result in a nice well behaved system.