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).

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

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).

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.

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.

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

VirtualBox 3 messes with sysfs (breaks mobile broadband cards, possibly other things)

link to this item - Dan Williams blog post

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

It has been discovered that VirtualBox 3.x, once installed, makes severe alterations to sysfs (a virtual filesystem present at /sys, provided by the kernel, which can be used by applications to track various information related to system devices). Details of some of the alteration caused by VirtualBox are available in Dan Williams' blog post on the issue. It is notable that you do not need to run VirtualBox for the alteration to happen, only install it. This issue could affect the smooth running of many applications, but one known problem it causes is it prevents NetworkManager from recognizing mobile broadband adapters.

A workaround for this particular issue is to create a file with this content:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!-- -*- xml -*- -->
 <deviceinfo version="0.2">
   <device>
     <match key="info.subsystem" string="usb">
       <match key="usb.vendor_id" int="0x0af0">
         <match key="usb.product_id" int_outof="0x6701">
           <merge key="info.linux.driver" type="string">option</merge>
         </match>
       </match>
     </match>
   </device>
 </deviceinfo>

And save it as /usr/share/hal/fdi/information/20thirdparty/10-vbox-usb-fixup.patch. Change the USB vendor ID and USB product ID values - 0x0af0 and 0x6701 in the example above - to the correct values for your adapter. You can find these values with the lsusb command.

However, due to the fact that this alteration of sysfs could cause other unpredictable problems, you should seriously consider removing VirtualBox entirely or reverting to VirtualBox 2.x. Fedora offers a KVM-based virtualization stack including KVM, qemu, libvirt and virt-manager in its repositories which allows for simple creation and use of virtual machines. This page provides an excellent introduction to the Fedora virtualization stack.

Unable to login to GDM using network authentication

link to this item - Bugzilla: #527920

Fedora 12 systems configured for a network authentication system (e.g. kerberos or lpap) 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