Fedora 41 won't work on my laptop

Ask Fedora
,
1

I pulled out a 10 yr old HP Pavilion from the closet, dusted it off and installed Workstation v41. (It is a beautiful piece of equipment I’d all but forgot about.
The run-live does fine, mostly. The install and the first boot all do normally and I have the desktop and can even 3-finger up-swipe gesture. As soon as I do ANYTHING like open setting or a terminal, Fedora immediately bricks. Reboot, repeat, over-and-over.

Video driver certainly.
This has:
VGA compatible controller: Intel Corp Skylake GT2 [HD Graphics 520] (rev 07)
3D controller: NVIDIA Corp GM108M [GeForce 940M] (rev a2)

After GREAT frustration I back installed Workstation v35. At least now I can get a terminal opened for a while. Open anything else and Fedora immediately bricks.

Next I’m rolling back to 2019!! by running Workstation v30 in Live mode. And I’m encouraged finally. Live mode is not bricking. Install freezes up on the first step, selecting a language. But I got to believe I could work that out if 2019 was to be my future.

HowTo kill and correct this poorly, default selected, Nvidia v41 driver by the install when v41 bricks post-install?

Thanks.

4

My guess is that you need the nvidia drivers to make this stable.
We recommend the rpmfusion drivers as they are built for fedora.
See Howto/NVIDIA - RPM Fusion
FYI make sure you setup secure boot signing keys or turn off secure boot in the BIOS as the howto directs.

7

Try. And failed. Suggestions on HOW to perform the actions indicated in the “Howto” link when the first thing that happens is Fedora bricks before anything else can be opened (hence the reason for my resorting to this post)?

Secure boot is already off.

8

PS: I am installed & running on v30 now. Is there a Fedora upgrade path that isn’t so insensitive to this driver problem?

9

Apparantly, your laptop is still working. So, Fedora 41 did not “brick” it.

10

did it happen after the first update?

11

Yeah. I guess so

12

try sudo dnf downgrade mesa*
i had not similar but freezing issue related new mesa 25.0v packages. your problems’ cause might be it as well

13

I’ve never known a laptop to be bricked at all.

A pad, a phone, and the like, sure. I’m not sure that’s even a thing with a laptop that I’ve ever seen.

But “bricked” has a connotation for its severity of the dysfunction differently than “frozen” or other euphemisms.

And these are euphemisms. An electronic device is never in fact a brick. Nor frozen as in in a freezer

14

Understand, post install, first boot, setup, and reboot, then first login, NOTHING CAN HAPPEN. It is “frozen” right there as soon as you try ANYTHING

15

Ps: but it’s running just fine on version 30.
So I’m thinking I should be able to upgrade, if even each individual version at a time, and if I knew how to predict at what point the upgrades are going to brick everything up again

16

what is that version 30? fedora? mesa?

17

Sorry. Earlier I was responding to the email of the message you sent.
In the email your first line you posted as a reply was not included.
I see what you’re saying about the downgrade. I’ll try that later

1 Like
18

Fedora Workstation 30 x86-64bit is the only thing I would know it by

19

Using incorrect terminology makes it harder for us to understand your issue. A “bricked” system can’t be turned on, making diagnosis impossible. It seems your system stops responding, but we need to know 1) has the kernels crashed or is it still alive and 2) see relevant error messages.

You have both Intel and Nvidia graphics. There have been several iterations of methods to switch between Intel and Nvidia. Some systems used an electronic switch that often failed. One of my systems was stuck using Nvidia graphics, resulting in limited battery life so it was only useful when it could be connected to a power source.

Using F41 Live USB, open a terminal and run sudo dnf install inxi and then inxi -Fzxx and post the output (as pre-formatted text using the </> button) so we can see details of your hardware.

The Fedora 41 installer gives you the open-source nouveau driver. I have encountered issues with older Nvidia cards where nouveau missed changes required by a newer kernel, and also cases where vendor firmware did not play well with a new kernel. This is understandable as kernel developers can’t test every hardware configuration – it is up to the users of older hardware to provide enough details so a developer can identify the bad code, and many vendors drop support for older hardware.

Do have another system that can connect to the Pavilion with ssh? This would allow you determine if the kernel is still alive and maybe catch relevant error messages. You may me able to examine error messages from a previous boot using a terminal in the Live environment and running journalctl to view entries from the installed F41.

20

The ssh idea is solid interesting. Is sshd up and running and properly configured and not blocked by a firewall of something out of the box post-install, setup, and reboot & re-login? (I’ll find out in a minute) Because as stated this thing is entirely none-responsive once logged in.

21

I can ping the laptop from a remote device. But ssh is denied, “connection refused”, like sshd is not configured or is firewalled by default (which would be preferential).

22

Turns out not even v30 is without this problem. Clicking on “Display Settings” turned Fedora completed unresponsive. Could this be that “switch” @gnwiii spoke to? That this will run in Intel VGA until something causes the OS to switch over driver to the Nvidia driver? Where more recent version more aggressively switch over to this higher level of dealing with graphics?

Working on installing V25 now.

23

If you boot up f41 and type ctrl-alt-f3 you will get a login prompt.
From there you can collect information and install software without starting up a desktop environment that is what is broken.

To get ssh working you will need to start the sshd.

sudo systemctl enable --now sshd
1 Like
24

:heart: Thanks. I expect tomorrow I’ll find these to be great tips