On Sat, Dec 22, 2018 at 10:47:54PM +0000, Pete Biggs wrote:
Then I ran the upgrade, which went without any notable issues. Reboot works fine. the X login screen appears, I enter my credentials and log in. It goes through a lot of motions and eventually stops with the snowy/gray background from the Plymouth boot screen, but with nothing at all on it, and no mouse pointer. X is clearly running, but is not displaying my Mate desktop.
I saved aside /var/log/messages and /var/log/Xorg.0.log, uploaded subsets of them to pastebin. the /var/log/messages subset is https://pastebin.com/MJR2T3Xz, while the xorg.0.log is https://pastebin.com/wrucd77z.
Note the repeating (apparent) failures at the end of Xorg.0.log.
They are fine, just normal chatter you get in there.
However, the /var/log/messages does contain some issues with the video driver e.g.:
Dec 22 09:43:37 elitebox kernel: radeon 0000:01:00.0: ring 0 stalled for more than 10221msec Dec 22 09:43:37 elitebox kernel: radeon 0000:01:00.0: GPU lockup (current fence id 0x00000000000002f3 last fence id 0x0000000000000302 on ring 0) Dec 22 09:43:37 elitebox kernel: radeon 0000:01:00.0: ring 0 stalled for more than 10722msec Dec 22 09:43:37 elitebox kernel: radeon 0000:01:00.0: GPU lockup (current fence id 0x00000000000002f3 last fence id 0x0000000000000302 on ring 0) Dec 22 09:43:38 elitebox kernel: [drm:r600_ib_test [radeon]] *ERROR* radeon: fence wait failed (-35). Dec 22 09:43:38 elitebox kernel: [drm:radeon_ib_ring_tests [radeon]] *ERROR* radeon: failed testing IB on GFX ring (-35).
That's indicative of either a GPU (i.e. graphics card) problem or a driver issue. You can search on the 2nd from last line and there are lots of hits on it but no real solution - I've seen "limit memory use to 3G", "change PCI slot", "OpenGL bug" to "buy different card".
a little hard to change the slot or buy a different card, when it is a laptop. :(
I don't know what any of this has to do with Mate, but would appreciate your assistance.
Almost certainly not. It's a kernel problem.
(I ran the update on a netbook and it went fine. both have Intel CPUs, the netbook has intel graphics, and the new-to-me-etc. laptop has a Radeon graphics chipset. I dunno if it makes any difference, or how to tell, or how to fix it, if it does.)
Suggestions appreciated, in advance!
You might like to try running a different distro on it to check - possibly run Fedora 29 Live from a USB drive. If that works OK using an updated Radeon kernel driver then you know the hardware is OK.
P.
Or perhaps the kernel-ml from elrepo ??