From Fedora Project Wiki

Revision as of 06:56, 13 November 2009 by Adamwill (talk | contribs) (add some blamevendor templates, and a note on the nvidia/kde issue (533620))

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.

Release Notes

Read the Fedora 12 release notes for specific information about intentional changes in Fedora 12, 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. 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 300 MB

link to this item - Bugzilla: #510970

If you use a separate /boot partition, it is highly recommended that it be at least 300MB in size.

CD tray problems or slow boot after installation from live CD

link to this item - Bugzilla: #527781

When installing from a live CD, the anaconda package is installed on the system. It includes some custom udev rules in the file /lib/udev/rules.d/70-anaconda.rules. These rules have been reported to cause various problems, ranging from CD trays closing again right after ejecting a CD or boot hanging in udev for a long time.

If your system shows these symptoms, you can simply remove the anaconda package. It is not needed once you have completed installation of the system.

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.

Software issues

Encrypted disks can't be unencrypted for non-graphical boot

link to this item - Bugzilla: #530896

Due to an unidentified bug early in the boot cycle, some users are unable to access encrypted disks or partitions at boot up when using a non-graphical boot splash. This issue can be worked around by booting with:

rhgb vga=0x318

on the kernel command line (specified at grub time).

If you are installing Fedora 12 and intend to use encrypted partitions, or are upgrading a system with encrypted partitions to Fedora 12 from an earlier release, it is recommended that you use the traditional installer - not a live image - to install, and make sure to enable the Fedora 12 - Updates repository during installation. This will ensure you are not affected by this issue.

An updated plymouth package has been released to address this issue. Update your system as usual to receive this update, if you do not yet already have it. You may need to rebuild your initial ramdisk after applying the update on an installed Fedora 12 system by running the following command: /usr/libexec/plymouth/plymouth-update-initrd as root. Make sure that you are booted into the latest installed kernel before rebuilding the initial ramdisk.

Problems when using the proprietary NVIDIA graphics driver (especially with KDE)

link to this item - Bugzilla: #533620 -

Third-party vendor issue
The root cause of this problem is not Fedora, but rather software provided by NVIDIA. If you are interested in a fix for this issue, you must contact that vendor through their web site.

We encourage Fedora users to use the free nouveau driver, rather than the proprietary nvidia driver, whenever possible.

Due to a bad interaction between the proprietary NVIDIA driver and a fix in Fedora 12's X.org server package for an unrelated problem, current versions of the said driver have several problems in Fedora 12. In particular, they render KDE almost unusable, as discussed in the bug report cited above. Fedora does not provide or support these proprietary drivers and cannot fix this issue. However, users who wish to use the proprietary driver with Fedora 12 can find an unsupported alternative build of the X.org server packages in a comment on the bug report, which several users have reported to work around this issue.

Adobe Reader fails to run

link to this item

Third-party vendor issue
The root cause of this problem is not Fedora, but rather software provided by Adobe. If you are interested in a fix for this issue, you must contact that vendor through their web site.

We encourage Fedora users to use a free alternative to Adobe reader, such as Evince, whenever possible.

The latest release of Adobe Reader (AdobeReader_enu-9.2-1.i486) works in Fedora 12. Previous 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.

Non-Fedora Mozilla/Firefox binaries may crash

Third-party vendor issue
The root cause of this problem is not Fedora, but rather software provided by Mozilla. If you are interested in a fix for this issue, you must contact that vendor through their web site.

There is a conflict between binary software downloaded from Mozilla and software included in Fedora which may lead to a crash, often seen when using Flash. See this page for details and workarounds.

Missing printer drivers

link to this item - Bugzilla: #536831

The foomatic package is not installed by default in a standard Fedora 12 installation. If you have a PostScript printer, or your printer requires an older driver such as one of the ghostscript built-in drivers, you may need to install this package before a driver for your printer will be available from the Fedora printer configuration tool. To install it, select System->Administration->Add/Remove Software from the main menu and search for "foomatic", or run this command from the command line as root: yum install foomatic.