Common F12 bugs: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 17:23, 22 October 2009

This page documents common bugs in Fedora 12 and, if available, fixes or workarounds for these problems. If you find your problem in this page, do not file a bug for it, unless otherwise instructed. Where appropriate, a reference to the current bug(s) in Bugzilla is included.

Fedora 12 has not yet been released. During this pre-release period, this page will cover known issues in the Fedora 12 pre-releases. Issues that are fixed will be removed from the page once a fix is available (for instance, an issue that affects the Beta but is fixed in the final release will be removed at the time of that release).

Release Summary, Announcement and Notes

Read the F12 Beta Announcement and the draft Fedora 12 release notes for specific information about changes in Fedora 12: known issues, and other general information.

My bug is not listed

Not every bug is listed in this page, but Bugzilla should be a comprehensive database of known bugs. This page is a sampling of the bugs most commonly discussed on our mailing lists and forums.

To see if your bug has already been reported, you can search Bugzilla. If it has not yet been reported, we encourage you to do so to help improve Fedora for yourself and others. A guide to Bugs and feature requests has been prepared to assist you.

If you believe an already-reported bug report should be added to this page because it is commonly enountered, you can:

Add it yourself, if you have wiki access. Remember to try and follow the style and guidelines explained in the comments in the page source.
Add the CommonBugs keyword to the bug report, and contact the Fedora QA team with the Bugzilla report number explaining why you believe that particular report qualifies as a common issue. You can contact Fedora QA through any of the methods listed here.

Issues when upgrading from previous releases

As usual, the supported methods for upgrading from previous Fedora releases are to do an 'upgrade install' from the regular installation media, or to use preupgrade (see How_to_use_PreUpgrade). Upgrading by using yum directly is not supported, but may in practice work. For known issues when upgrading via yum, see the page on this upgrade method.

Installation issues

/boot must be a minimum of 500 MB

link to this item - Bugzilla: #510970

If you use a separate /boot partition, it is highly recommended that it be at least 500MB in size.

First boot wizard unusable (buttons invisible) on some multiple display configurations

link to this item - Bugzilla: #526836

The first boot wizard - which runs on the first boot of a newly-installed system to display license information, handle user creation and offer to submit hardware information to the Smolt database - does not display consistently on multiple display configurations in Fedora 12 Beta. On some configurations, the wizard may be usable but stretched across all connected monitors. On others, it may be restricted to one monitor only. In the worst case, the wizard will display in such a way that the buttons needed to progress through the steps (which should be shown at the bottom-right hand corner) are invisible, being rendered outside the boundaries of all connected monitors.

This issue has been fixed in a later version of the firstboot package, but the fix was too late to be included in the Beta. It will be included in the final release. If you encounter this bug in the Beta, there are two main possible workarounds. You can either use the tab and enter keys to activate the buttons without seeing them, or reboot the system with only one monitor connected to work through the first boot wizard, then reboot again with all monitors connected once you have made it through the wizard.

In rare cases, you may encounter this bug on a system with only one display, when it intersects with an X.org driver bug which causes your system to believe extra displays are connected when in fact they aren't. In this case, you can use the tab/enter workaround described above, or boot to runlevel 3 by adding the number 3 as a kernel parameter. This will cause a text configuration wizard to be displayed instead of the graphical firstboot wizard. If you have not yet created a user account, you should do so from this wizard. Then you can reboot as normal. If you find yourself in this situation, please file a bug on the phantom extra display problem, following these instructions.

First boot after installation fails on Apple Mac PowerPC systems

link to this item - Bugzilla: #529035

After a standard installation on an Apple Mac PowerPC system, booting the system fails with the message Unknown or corrupt filesystem. This is due to the installer (Anaconda) failing to ensure the hfsutils package is installed on such systems.

To workaround this issue, use the manual package selection option during installation and ensure that the hfsutils package is selected for installation. This issue should be resolved in the final release of Fedora 12.

Hardware-related issues

Miscellaneous problems with Intel graphics adapters

link to this item

If you are suffering from problems with an Intel graphics adapter such as failure of X to start at all, hangs or freezes or crashes in the graphical environment, display corruption, failure of 3D accelerated applications to work properly or similar problems, and your issue is not specifically covered elsewhere on this page, the following general advice may be of use.

Several such issues may be worked around by disabling kernel mode setting. To do this, add

nomodeset

as a kernel parameter. If this solves your problem, please check whether a bug has already been reported for it, and if not, file a new bug report on the xorg-x11-drv-intel component, explaining your symptoms, and providing all the usual information required for X.org bug reports. In future kernel mode setting will be the only available method, and so we wish to ensure all problems caused by kernel mode setting are fixed.

If this does not resolve your issue, one other potential workaround is to change to a different acceleration method. To do this, add a line:

Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"

or:

Option "AccelMethod" "XAA"

to the Device section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf. If that file does not exist, see How_to_create_xorg.conf for instructions on how to create it. Again, if doing this works around the problem you are experiencing, please check whether a bug report on the problem has already been filed, and if not, please file a new bug report on the xorg-x11-drv-intel component, explaining your symptoms, and providing all the usual information required for X.org bug reports. These legacy acceleration methods will be removed in future, so any bugs in the new acceleration method (UXA) need to be fixed.

Miscellaneous problems with ATI / AMD graphics adapters

link to this item - Bugzilla: #498457

If you are experiencing failure to start the graphical desktop, hanging or freezing, corruption, or slow performance with an ATI / AMD graphics adapter, you may try the following.

Some issues may be worked around by disabling kernel mode setting. To do this, add

nomodeset

as a kernel parameter. If this solves your problem, please check whether a bug has already been reported for it, and if not, file a new bug report on the xorg-x11-drv-ati component, explaining your symptoms, and providing all the usual information required for X.org bug reports. In future kernel mode setting will be the only available method, and so we wish to ensure all problems caused by kernel mode setting are fixed.

If this does not resolve your issue, one other potential workaround is to change to a different acceleration method. To do this, add a line:

Option "AccelMethod" "XAA"

to the Device section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf. If that file does not exist, see How_to_create_xorg.conf for instructions on how to create it. Again, if doing this works around the problem you are experiencing, please check whether a bug report on the problem has already been filed, and if not, please file a new bug report on the xorg-x11-drv-ati component, explaining your symptoms, and providing all the usual information required for X.org bug reports. These legacy acceleration methods will be removed in future, so any bugs in the new acceleration method (EXA) need to be fixed.

If this does not resolve your issue, there is another configuration option to try. Add a line:

Option "AccelDFS" "off"

to the Device section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf. If that file does not exist, see How_to_create_xorg.conf for instructions on how to create it. Again, if doing this works around the problem you are experiencing, please check whether a bug report on the problem has already been filed, and if not, please file a new bug report on the xorg-x11-drv-ati component, explaining your symptoms, and providing all the usual information required for X.org bug reports.

Finally, if this still does not resolve your issue, try adding this line:

Option "DRI" "off"

to the Device section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Again, if doing this works around the problem you are experiencing, please check whether a bug report on the problem has already been filed, and if not, please file a new bug report on the xorg-x11-drv-ati component, explaining your symptoms, and providing all the usual information required for X.org bug reports.

Systems with ATI / AMD Radeon graphics adapters unstable, hang after a short time

link to this item - Bugzilla: #517625

Several users have reported instability with ATI / AMD Radeon graphics adapters in Fedora 12 Beta, often manifesting as the system hanging after running for a short time. If you are experiencing this problem, try adding pcie_aspm=off as a kernel boot parameter. You can edit the kernel command line by pressing tab during the bootloader screen, then following the on-screen instructions to change the boot options. If adding this parameter resolves the issue for you, please add a comment to the bug report explaining that you suffer from this issue, and including the output of the command lspci -nn.

Software issues

ALSA sequencer unavailable by default

link to this item - Bugzilla: #505421

Due to a misconfiguration, in Fedora 12 Beta, the snd-seq module - which provides the ALSA sequencer interface - is not loaded by default. This affects applications which use the sequencer, such as qjackctl - "Could not open ALSA sequencer as a client", "ALSA MIDI patchbay will not be available" - and tuxguitar.

To work around this problem, create a file with the following contents:

install snd-pcm /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install snd-pcm && /sbin/modprobe snd-seq

and save it as /etc/modprobe.d/dist-alsa.conf. This issue should be resolved in the final release of Fedora 12.

Unable to login to GDM using network authentication

link to this item - Bugzilla: #527920

Fedora 12 Beta systems configured for a network authentication system (e.g. kerberos or ldap) may be unable to login using the GNOME Display Manager (GDM). Systems exhibiting this problem will not permit login for remote user accounts and may not offer a dialog to manually enter the remote username. A suggested workaround involves adding a temporary entry in /etc/passwd for affected users. One method to accomplish this is demonstrated below.

# getent passwd <username> >> /etc/passwd

NetworkManager applet crashes at each login

link to this item - Bugzilla: #529766

Fedora 12 Beta systems running GNOME with updates may experience a bug where the NetworkManager notification icon crashes the first time it tries to run (usually, when a user logs in). To work around this problem, just run nm-applet manually from a console or the GNOME Run dialog box: nm-applet --sm-disable.

This issue was fixed in the updated NetworkManager-0.7.996-5.git20091021.fc12 package set. To solve the issue, update your Fedora 12 Beta installation as usual. You should no longer encounter this issue after updating to that version or later of NetworkManager and related packages.

System does a disk check at every reboot because 'timestamp is in the future'

link to this item - Bugzilla: #522969

On Fedora 12 Beta systems where the system clock is set to local time rather than UTC, depending on the time zone, the system may decide on startup that the last access to a filesystem occurred in the future, and force a filesystem consistency check.

This issue was fixed in the updated e2fsprogs-1.41.9-5.fc12 package. To solve the issue, update your Fedora 12 Beta installation as usual. You should no longer encounter this issue after updating to that version or later of e2fsprogs.

Adobe Reader fails to run