> > 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". > > 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.