Common F13 bugs

This page documents common bugs in Fedora 13 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 13 has not yet been released. During this pre-release period, this page will cover known issues in the Fedora 13 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 F13 Alpha release announcement and the draft Fedora 13 release notes for specific information about changes in Fedora 13: 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 encountered, you can:

• Add it yourself, if you have wiki access. Please follow the style and guidelines explained in the comments in the page source.
• Or, add the CommonBugs keyword to the bug report. Someone from the QA team will then inspect the issue to determine whether the bug should be listed as a common bug. To expedite your request, please add a comment to the bug that includes
  1. a summary of the problem
  2. any known workarounds
  3. an assessment on the impact to Fedora users

For reference, you can query Bugzilla for bugs tagged CommonBugs:

• CommonBugs? (bugs with CommonBugs keyword, but do not yet have a link to this page)
• CommonBugs+ (bugs with CommonBugs keyword and contain a link to this page)

Issues when upgrading from previous releases

Installer fails after upgrade with writeGrub() error

link to this item - Bugzilla: #568567

During a system upgrade using the Fedora 13 Alpha installer, a failure will present after the upgrade process has completed. A sample failure is available for comparison. The presence of this failure does not impact the upgraded system. In fact, you may reboot the installer and return to your upgraded Fedora 13 system. This bug has been fixed in anaconda-13.33-1 and will be available in Fedora 13 Beta. Until then, should you wish to workaround the bug, a updates.img is available. For help using an updates.img, see Anaconda/Updates.

Preupgrade doesn't work with default-sized /boot partition

link to this item

Preupgrade is intended to provide a hassle-free method for upgrading a system to the current release of Fedora. Testing identified that users of Fedora 12 (and earlier) who installed their systems using the recommended /boot partition size of 200 MiB will not be able to upgrade their systems using preupgrade. The /boot filesystem is used to store the kernel and initial ramdisk images that form the core of the Fedora operating system. Its presence is required by several utilities including grub, kernel and preupgrade.

Users that have /boot partition size of at least FIXME should not have problems with using preupgrade. For others it is recommended to simply download Fedora 13 DVD/CD/netinst install medium and do a standard system upgrade. More experienced users that still want to use preupgrade may refer to these additional tips to free up space in /boot.

For Fedora 13 the default /boot partition size was increased to 500 MiB to avoid these problems in the future.

Installation issues

Failure to eject CD-ROM when prompting for next disc

link to this item - Bugzilla: #569377

During a Fedora 13 Alpha CD-ROM installation, the installer may fail to properly eject the media when prompting for a subsequent installation disc. Investigation appears to show that performing a media check on the ISO media may trigger this failure later during install.

If you encounter this issue while installing from CD-ROM media, you may work around the problem using the procedure detailed below.

1. When prompted to insert the next disc, change to the debug shell on tty2 by pressing <Control><Alt>F2
2. Eject the disc by typing: eject /dev/cdrom
3. Insert the requested installation disc number
4. Prepare the disc by typing: mount -o ro /dev/cdrom /mnt/source
5. Return to the installer by pressing <Control><Alt>F6

The above procedure may be repeated for each installation disc needed to complete the install.

Installing on a system with previously encrypted block devices fails - LVMError: lvactivate failed for lv_root

link to this item - Bugzilla: #565848

When installing Fedora 13 Alpha on a system with an existing encrypted block device, you will encounter a failure if you attempt to reformat the system. Until resolved, whenever installing Fedora 13 Alpha on a system with encrypted block devices, it is recommended that you do not provide the passphrase to unlock the existing encrypted block devices. When prompted for a passphrase, press Cancel. Alternatively, you may choose to erase any partition information from disks affected by running a command similar to the following.

dd if=/dev/zero bs=512 count=1 of=/dev/sda

Backup your data
Please backup any data before erasing the partition table. It is likely that you will be unable to recover the information on the disk after executing the dd command.

Installation using LVM requires a large amount of RAM (over 512MB)

link to this item - Bugzilla: #559290

Due to a bug in lvm2, installing Fedora 13 Alpha with any partition layout that involves LVM (including the default configuration) requires a large amount of system memory. 512MB is not enough, while 1GB usually is; extensive testing has not been done at levels between these two. If you are installing Fedora 13 Alpha on a system with less than 1GB of physical memory, you may need to use a custom partition layout with no use of LVM. If you are installing into a virtual machine, please allocate 1GB or more of memory to the virtual machine for the installation phase. You may be able to reduce the memory allocated to the virtual machine after installation.

Software issues

PackageKit silently fails to update

link to this item - Bugzilla: #567346 Bugzilla: #569352

After installing Fedora 13 Alpha, some testers experienced a problem where the Software Update utility (provided by gnome-packagekit) fails to update the system software when requested. The Software Update utility will quickly report that the software update has completed without actually downloading and installing any updates. Running the Software Update utility again will show that no updates have been applied.

It is believed that a yum plugin provided by yum-langpacks may introduce package dependency conflicts, which will cause the update to silently fail. The problem may affect upgrades using both the Software Update utility and yum. Testing also demonstrated that the problem was difficult to reproduce and depends on whether the yum-langpacks plugin is installed, and whether certain conditions exist in the package repositories used during the update.

If you are unable to update your system and the problem description above matches your symptoms, you may work around the issue by removing the yum-langpacks package. To remove the package you may either:

1. Open a terminal and type: su -c 'yum remove yum-langpacks'
2. Or, from the default Desktop environment
   1. Select the System -> Administration -> Add/Remove Software menu item
   2. Enter the text yum-langpacks in the text-box
   3. Deselect the check-box associated with yum-langpacks and select, Apply

KDE graphical package management fails to run at all

link to this item - Bugzilla: #568931

There is unfortunately a version mismatch in Fedora 13 Alpha images between PackageKit and kpackagekit, the KDE package management tool. This means that kpackagekit will fail to run at all in KDE after installation of Fedora 13 Alpha, from the KDE live image or the traditional installer. An updated version of kpackagekit is available in the Fedora 13 repositories. To update to this version, open a terminal and run the command su -c 'yum update kpackagekit'. Enter your root password when prompted to do so. If the KDE package management tools still fail to launch even after this, try doing a full system update with yum: su -c 'yum update'. If that encounters dependency problems, try su -c 'yum update --skip-broken'.

This issue is fixed in Fedora 13 Beta.

GNOME cannot store new secrets (passwords)

link to this item - Bugzilla: #558678

There is a bug in the gnome-keyring packages included with Fedora 13 Alpha which results in GNOME applications being unable to store new secrets (usually passwords) in the GNOME keyring. If you upgrade an existing installation, existing secrets will continue to be retrieved from the keyring correctly, but you will not be able to add new ones or change existing ones. For instance, you will not be able to store new wireless network passwords: you will need to enter the password each time you connect to the network.

Print operations cause Firefox to crash

link to this item - Bugzilla: #553834

Due to an underlying problem in libgcrypt (see this bug comment for technical details), there is a flaw in the Fedora 13 Alpha printing stack which causes Firefox to crash immediately if you try to print or do a print preview. An updated cups package, which works around the libgcrypt bug, is available in the Fedora 13 repositories to address this issue. Simply update your Fedora 13 system to get this fix. Of course, Fedora 13 Beta will include the fix upon its release.

GNOME Shell fails to run at all

link to this item - Bugzilla: #567116

Fedora 13 Alpha includes version 1.2 of the Clutter toolkit, but gnome-shell has not yet been ported to work with this version. As a consequence, in Fedora 13 Alpha, any attempt to use GNOME Shell will fail. Work to port GNOME Shell to Clutter 1.2 is under way, and we hope to include a usable GNOME Shell in Fedora 13 Beta.

Xorg Fails to run in VirtualBox

link to this item - Bugzilla: #569664

Fedora 13 Alpha includes a version of Xorg that does not appear to be functional with VirtualBox. There is already a fix planned and there is more information on the topic here.