Common F12 bugs

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 pre-release that fixes them is available (for instance, an issue that affects the Alpha but is fixed in the Beta will be removed when the Beta is released).

Release Summary, Announcement and Notes

Read the Fedora 12 Alpha 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.

RAID array creation fails, hanging the system

link to this item

Due to a known kernel bug, RAID array creation is very likely to fail and cause the system to hang in Fedora 12 Alpha. This bug is fixed in kernel 2.6.31-0.155.rc6 and later, but the Alpha installer uses an earlier kernel version. We recommend you do not attempt to create RAID arrays during installation of Fedora 12 Alpha.

Installation fails on systems with media card reader attached

link to this item - Bugzilla: #517603

Several users have encountered a problem where Fedora 12 Alpha installation fails on a system with a media card reader (either internal or external) attached. The error traceback ends with the line ValueError: size must be positive. This problem can be worked around by disconnecting the media card reader. If it is an internal reader, you will need to open the system to do this. It will probably be connected to a USB header on the motherboard. This can safely be disconnected with the system powered down and disconnected from the mains. Once you have completed installation, you can power down the system once more and reconnect the card reader.

This issue has been fixed in Anaconda on 2009-09-02. Any Fedora 12 image composed with a Rawhide base from after that date will not experience this issue. This issue will be marked as resolved in this page when Fedora 12 Beta is released.

Alpha live images too large to fit on a CD

link to this item

Several of the live images for Fedora 12 Alpha are too large to fit onto a CD. They can however be burned to a DVD or written to a USB stick and will work without problems in those situations. We are aware of this problem, but will not issue updated live images for the Alpha. Live images for future pre-releases and the final release will be tweaked to ensure they do fit onto a CD (except for the spins for which this has never been the case).

Hardware-related issues

nomodeset kernel option ignored

link to this item - Bugzilla: #510673

Due to a known kernel bug, the nomodeset argument may not correctly disable kernel modesetting. An additional driver-specific kernel option may be required to further disable modesetting. Depending on your display adapter, you may need to supply one of the following options to disable kernel modesetting:

• If you have an ATI Radeon adapter: radeon.modeset=0
• If you have an NVidia adapter: nouveau.modeset=0
• If you have an Intel i915 adapter: i915.modeset=0

To determine your display adapter, please refer to How_to_debug_Xorg_problems#What_driver_am_I_using.3F.

Software issues

SELinux information tool (sealert) fails to run

link to this item - Bugzilla: #517261

Due to a missing dependency, the SELinux information tool that runs when you click on the link that offers more information when you are notified of an SELinux alert, or if you simply click on the SELinux icon in the system tray, or if you run sealert manually from the console, does not work out of the box on the Fedora 12 Alpha live CDs. If you run it from a console you will see that it fails to find a module named slip.dbus.service. To fix this problem, install the python-slip-dbus package.

Display goes blank briefly, apparently at random

link to this item - Bugzilla: #501601

Several users have reported that their display will sometimes suddenly go blank for a brief period - a second or two - before coming back. This is caused by problems in how X handles idle time counting.

An updated xorg-x11-server package is available from Koji (and will be available in Rawhide after the Alpha freeze ends). Users experiencing this problem are encouraged to test this update and report to Bugzilla whether it solves the problem. Please note that initial testing has indicated this test update fixes the problem, but causes other side effects (such as screensaver never activating at all, or display being blanked while playing a video in Totem).

Adobe Reader fails to run

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This problem lies outside the scope of the Fedora project, as Adobe Reader is proprietary software and cannot be made a part of the Fedora project, but we provide the information as a service to our users. We encourage Fedora users to use a free alternative to Adobe reader, such as Evince, whenever possible. Current releases of Adobe Reader do not run by default on Fedora 12. To work around this problem, launch Adobe Reader with the following command:

GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1 acroread