This page documents common bugs in Fedora 21 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 21 has not yet been released. During this pre-release period, this page will cover known issues in the Fedora 21 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 Notes
Read the F21_Alpha_release_announcement for specific information about changes in Fedora 21 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. Common bugs instructions provides guidance on how to add an entry to the page correctly, but the most important thing is to make sure that the bug is listed - don't worry if you don't get the format quite right, we can clean it up later.
- 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
- a summary of the problem
- any known workarounds
- 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)
Installation issues
Network install image offers all package groups
link to this item - Bugzilla: #1134524
This is no longer considered a bug, exactly, but remains documented here for clarity. Initial Fedora 21 plans envisaged Server and Workstation releases each having their own network install images which, by default, would offer only the package groups relevant to that Product. However, it became clear that this design was difficult to implement and not really particularly desired by anyone.
For Fedora 21 Beta and Final, there will be a single designated network install image, built from the Server tree, which defaults to the Fedora Server package set but allows installation of all package groups. In practical terms it is little different from the network install image shipped with Fedora 20 and earlier except that it defaults to the Server package group rather than the GNOME desktop (it may also have some degree of Server visual branding).
The details of exactly how this image will be described and promoted are undetermined as of yet (Beta release time), but in practice it is a universal network install image allowing deployment of all Fedora package sets. It can be used for doing network installs of the Workstation product in cases where this is preferable to installing from the live image (e.g. mass deployments).
Resizing of NTFS partitions disabled in Fedora 21 Beta
link to this item - Bugzilla: #1120964
A bug was discovered during pre-release testing of Fedora 21 Beta which could result in corruption of NTFS volumes when attempting to resize them with the Fedora 21 installer. A potential fix for this has been identified, but it is complex and requires further review and testing. Rather than delay the Fedora 21 Beta release further to test and incorporate this fix, we decided to release it with resizing of NTFS volumes disabled to ensure no data would be lost to the bug.
If you need to resize an NTFS volume to free up space for a Fedora 21 Beta installation, we recommend using a third party tool of some kind to do this prior to running the Fedora installer.
If testing of the proposed fix goes well, Fedora 21 Final will re-enable NTFS resizing.
"No disks detected" on live install of Fedora 21 Beta: disks incorrectly detected as multipath devices
link to this item - Bugzilla: #1154347
In some circumstances, it's possible the system may incorrectly detect regular local disks as multipath devices when installing from a Fedora 21 Beta live image. This could result in the disks not being available for selection as install targets (and a 'No disks detected' message if this affects all available disks). This issue does not appear from testing so far to affect many systems.
It should be possible to work around this problem by installing from a non-live image, or by creating a file /etc/multipath.conf with the following contents before launching the installer:
blacklist {
}
defaults {
user_friendly_names yes
find_multipaths yes
}
link to this item - Bugzilla: #986731
If you have an existing UEFI-native operating system and do a UEFI-native install of Fedora alongside it, attempting to boot the previously existing OS from Fedora's bootloader may fail consistently. The reason for this failure is that os-prober currently fails to set the correct boot options for the previously existing OS in the GRUB menu.
You may be able to use your system firmware's interface to the UEFI boot manager to boot the previously existing OS directly. This boot menu is often accessible at reboot time by interrupting the boot process and choosing to boot from a different device, but implementations vary between firmwares. The Windows boot option is often named Windows Boot Manager.
Alternatively, you can use the efibootmgr command from Fedora to direct the system to boot a particular UEFI boot manager entry on the next reboot. efibootmgr should list all the UEFI boot manager entries. Identify the one for Windows, and run su -c 'efibootmgr -n XXXX', where XXXX is the (hexadecimal) number that follows the word Boot in the efibootmgr output for that entry. For instance, if efibootmgr showed:
[user@host ~]# efibootmgr BootCurrent: 0000 Timeout: 1 seconds BootOrder: 0000,0002 Boot0000* Fedora Boot0002* Windows Boot Manager
then you could run su -c 'efibootmgr -n 0002' to instruct the system to boot Windows on the next startup.
You may also be able to manually edit the Fedora bootloader (GRUB) configuration to supply the parameters required to boot the previously existing OS from the Fedora boot menu.
Upgrade issues
You must specify the --product parameter for upgrades to Fedora 21 to decide which Fedora 'Product' you want the upgraded system to be considered to be - you can choose 'workstation', 'server', 'cloud', or 'nonproduct'. Pick the one that most closely matches the purpose of the system (for desktop systems, use 'workstation' for typical Fedora GNOME installs, and 'nonproduct' for other desktops or stripped/heavily customized GNOME installs).
The call to fedup should look something like this:
# fedup --network 21 --product workstation
Boot issues
UEFI multiboot with existing Fedora installations fails
link to this item - Bugzilla: #964828
If you have an existing UEFI-native installation of Fedora (any supported release), then install Fedora 21 alongside it, you will likely find that attempting to boot the older installation from the bootloader menu now fails. This is due to entries for existing installations in the new installation's bootloader being incorrectly formed.
The bug report contains information that may help you to work around this issue by modifying the bootloader entries. We aim to ensure it is fixed in the Fedora 21 Final release.
GNOME issues
Keyring broken if online account configured during initial setup
link to this item - Bugzilla: #1154206
If you install Fedora 21 Beta Workstation without creating a user account, and then configure an 'online account' (like a Google, Facebook or ownCloud account) during GNOME's 'initial setup' process in which you also create the initial user account, the user's keyring will be wrongly created. This will result in a password dialog appearing immediately on login to the system for which there is no valid answer; subsequent actions involving the configured online account will likely invoke the same dialog.
No workaround for this issue has yet been identified besides simply not using the Online Account feature of the initial setup tool (you can configure these accounts successfully from the Control Center after installation). If you have already hit this bug and have an affected user account, the easiest course of action is to remove it and create a new one, transferring across any desired data.
A network installation of Workstation should not be affected by this issue, as it should install a later version of the 
gnome-initial-setup
GNOME Initial Setup crashes if no keyboard is selected
link to this item - Bugzilla: #1154171
On first use of a Fedora 21 Workstation system (or other Fedora 21 installation with the GNOME desktop), an 'initial setup' process is run (the same as described in the previous issue). One of the early stages asks you to pick a keyboard layout. Depending on your earlier choice of language and location, it is possible that no layout will be pre-selected on the initial list of layout choices. If no layout is selected, and you do not select one but simply click Next, the initial setup tool will crash.
The workaround for this issue is to make sure you select a keyboard layout. If none of the layouts is the one you want, clicking the '...' choice at the bottom of the list will cause the full list of layouts to be provided.
KDE issues
Display sometimes does not update in KDE (including during installation)
link to this item - Bugzilla: #1142862 - Bugzilla: #1103496
Some testers have reported an issue where the KDE desktop appears to freeze. However, it is only the display that is frozen; mouse clicks, keypresses and so on will take effect, and the display may unfreeze some time later. This issue has most often been seen during Fedora installation from the KDE live image, but some testers have reported seeing it in normal KDE use as well.
No reliable workaround is yet known for this bug besides working blind or waiting for the issue to resolve itself, although it may help to disable desktop effects with Alt+Shift+F12.
This issue has often been observed during installation, and may be perceived as the installer having 'frozen' - in fact it has not, and installation is still proceeding successfully.
Graphical package manager missing some PackageKit features
link to this item - Bugzilla: #1098735
In Fedora 21 Beta,
ARM issues
Fedora Server issues
Rolekit fails to deploy a Domain Controller on a VM, returning error 256
link to this item Creation of a Domain Controller role requires the system to have a sufficient amount of entropy available to securely create the keys for the included certificate authority and Kerberos key distribution center. It is very common when deploying on a virtual machine that has just been created that there will not be sufficient entropy available, which will result in the Domain Controller deployment timing out waiting on /dev/random and then failing with error code 256.
On VM hosts that support it (such as KVM on Fedora 20 and 21), it is recommended to create the VM using the virt-RNG device (which the Fedora Server 21 guest will automatically detect). This will allow it to collect entropy from the host machine and should reduce the likelihood of encountering this issue. As a workaround (if you do not have a host capable of providing entropy), you can also run the following command to make the system use the less-secure /dev/urandom entropy device:
# /usr/sbin/rngd -r /dev/urandom
FreeIPA startup fails due to timing issues
link to this item - Bugzilla: #1071356
This bug appears to occur only occasionally. Sometimes, startup of a FreeIPA server - ipa.service - may fail, apparently due to some kind of race / timing issue between it, named.service and dirsrv.target. It does appear to happen only rarely, and when it happens, just starting ipa.service again should succeed.
Other issues
Installation of 'environment groups' fails due to conflicts between fedora-release packages
link to this item - Bugzilla: #1160917
Due to some limitations in how Fedora's package group mechanism works and some changes made to support the introduction of "Products" in Fedora 21, you may often encounter conflicts when trying to install the 'environment groups' seen in yum grouplist after installing Fedora 21. If you install a Fedora Product - Workstation, Cloud, or Server - it is likely that attempting to install any other 'environment group' will fail. If you use a non-Product install - for instance, install from a desktop live image - it is likely that you will be able to successfully install other non-Product environment groups, but not the environment groups associated with each Product.
The most common case in which you're likely to encounter this is trying to add extra desktops to a Workstation or other desktop installation. If you install Workstation and then want to add any other desktop, or install another desktop and then want to add GNOME and decide to try and use the 'Workstation' group, you will likely run into this problem.
Fortunately there is a fairly simple workaround for this problem: just add --exclude fedora-release\* to your command, e.g. yum groupinstall kde-desktop-environment --exclude fedora-release\*.
It may not be possible to resolve this fully for Fedora 21. The bug report contains the detailed explanation of the problem, and solutions for it will likely be discussed there, if you wish to keep up to date.