On 21/12/18 5:21 PM, Fred Smith wrote: > On Wed, Dec 19, 2018 at 01:50:06PM -0500, Fred Smith wrote: >> hI ALL! >> >> There have been a large enough number of people posting here about difficulties when upgrading from 7. to 7.6 that I'm being somewhat paranoid about it. >> >> I have several machines to upgrade, but so far the only one I've dared >> to work on (least critical if it goes bad) is my new-to-me-but-used >> laptop. >> >> First I did a 'dd' backup of the whole drive onto an external USB drive >> then did the upgrade. Since I use the Mate desktop, I enabled the >> epel testing repo (per postings on Mate troubles at the time of the >> upgrade). >> >> Result: Boots to GDM just fine, but Mate is a black screen. Switching >> to Gnome, works fine, but I can't stand Gnome. Not knowing what else >> to try I restored the dd backup. >> >> Later I inserted a spare HD and did a new install from the DVD >> media. This installed without issue, but now no desktop works. >> Switching to a console (CTRL-ALT-F2) I did a full "yum update", >> which installed quite a few packages, but upon reboot nothing had >> improved. So I added the epel repo (and testing) and installed Mate. >> Ditto, nothing had changed. >> >> This laptop is fairly old, and according to lshw, has a RV635/M86 >> [Mobility Radeon HD 3650]I] video chipset, in case it matters. >> CPU is identified as: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T9400 @ 2.53GHz >> >> Having previously installed 7.5 on it without trouble, on which Mate >> works just fine, I wonder what could have become so broken that neither >> an upgrade nor a fresh install works. >> >> I have, as I said, several other machines to upgrade, too, some of them >> have Nvidia grahics (esp. my main desktop box, which also uses Linux >> software RAID-1) and all run Mate. Then there is a netbook (low priority) >> a couple of VMs (in virtualbox) and at work several other VMS as well as >> bare-metal on a Lenovo deskside machine, and I'm afraid to do an update >> on all of them because I need them to be in usable condition. The Lenovo >> box in my office is somewhat urgent, as I am about to retire and turn >> it over to someone else who doesn't know much about Linux. >> >> I'd appreciate any advice I can get on how to get these systems upgraded >> without breaking them. >> >> thanks in advance for your help! >> >> Fred > One more data point: After taking a dd backup of the HD in my Acer > Aspire One netbook (screaming 1.6 GHz Atom, dual core!!), I did the > 7.5 to 7.6 update and it went perfectly fine, although it had 800 > packages to update, so it was kinda slow. > > Do any of you know if the various Nvidia issues, and problems upgrading > software RAID1 systems have reached resolution? I haven't seen postings > here regarding solutions for those problems, and knowing my luck, I would > hit both of 'em on my personal desktop. > > Thanks in advance for any response! > > Fred I had major issues with two machines, both with nvidia cards. I found that the SL spin of CentOS 7 has fixes for the xorg problems. Akemi Yagi posted the solution which worked fine - it was just difficult to get the required files onto the broken device with no gui. <cut / paste> >> The only issue I've seen reported that sounds similar or possibly >> related is: >> >> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1650634 > Yes, seems this is the laptop issue, will prove tomorrow. >> There is a patch in that bug you might like to try. > Not too keen on this, would need to find a detailed howto as I have not > done any rebuilds for a number of years. I presume that RH will at some > point release a fix for this? The submitter of RHBZ 1650634 is a developer of Scientific Linux. The xorg packages in SL 7.6 have been published with the referenced patch applied. If you so wish, you could install their packages. ftp://linux1.fnal.gov/linux/scientific/7.6/x86_64/updates/security/ Note the "sl7" tag instead of "el7". Akemi </cut>