Distrowatch: What went wrong with Fedora Core 4

[Michael A. Peters]

On Thu, 2005-07-14 at 20:41 -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
*snip*
> >
> >yum has never messed up my system.
> 
*snip*
> 
> No, I don't think you are.  I *think* I'm trying to shoot the 
> messenger.
> 
> The real question seems to me, how did this new kernel get past 
> testing if it won't even boot? 

Well - perhaps one of my lucky charms is I have exclude=kernel in my
yum.conf file.
I don't upgrade the kernel unless it looks like a change directly
benefits me.

As far as how it gets past testing if it won't boot - the answer is
probably that Red Hat QA does not have every hardware configuration out
there.

>  Thats now vmlinuz-2.6.12-1.1390_FC4, 
> the matching initrd, System.map etc.  The .1-1369 seems to be ok if I 
> don't want to run X.
> 
> And, what broke X?

That I don't know. There are some issues with X in FC4 - such as the
libvgahw.a gcc4 bug.

> 
> And, what broke kde's kicker panel?  On a previous install, there was 
> a report from yum that kde3/launcher_panelapplet.so errored, and it 
> was repeated during this most recent yum session.  That I believe is 
> part of kdebase, which yum replaced everytime I could get a boot that 
> could run yum.  I think the kde3/launcher_panelapplet.so is related 
> to the loss of the kicker panel at the bottom of the x screen that I 
> had after the first yum update a week and about 7 installs back, 
> correct?
> 
> I just tried both gnome and kde, neither will run x.  At this point, I 
> don't think its an x problem or it would log an error.  It is not now 
> logging any errors.

what happens when you try startx?
There should be *some* output if it fails to start.

> "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
>  soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
> -Ed Howdershelt (Author)

That's great :D