Fact: F40 was functional on the system prior to attempting the F41 install.
Fact: MacBook Air specs. 4GB RAM/128GB SSD
Installing Fedora Workstation 41 through the Software app failed. I was unable to reboot the system. Using the F40 USB installer I could verify F41 labels on the target system partitions but no dice.
The next step was to use Fedora Media Writer to create an F41 USB installer (yes, on my daily driver Mac mini). Using the verification choice on booting the USB installer I observed the 100% mark reached on the verification. The boot sequence on the USB installer failed with the last line being something like [OK] GDM something, something.
Finally, booting the F41 USB installer again, I selected the basic graphics (3rd choice in the USB boot menu) . This worked. F41 booted from the USB installer and after using the Disks app to delete all existing partitions on the target system, F41 installed and booted up on its own after the automatic installation.
I wonder if this bug report is related. You tell me.
Hope this helps folks on ancient machines, Mac or otherwise
Macbook machines with the intel cpu tend to use the broadcom wifi and nvidia gpu. Both require proprietary drivers so the basic gaphics install bypassed the loading of gpu drivers during install.
This is a known issue with any machine that has only an nvidia gpu and for macs especially. Once installed fedora is able to use the nouveau driver for the gpu until the user decides to install the nvidia drivers.
Hello, I had the same issue when upgrading from Fedora 40 to 41 on my MacBook Air 2011. The normal dnf system upgrade results in the system coming up without graphics working. On hindsight, I probably could have worked around this by adding nomodeset to the kernel boot options instead of going the USB re-install route.
After updating via the usb Live boot, I found there were a couple issues:
PM Suspend/resume no longer works. The system does not wake up after suspend and requires a hard power button reboot. Could be related to #2 below.
noveau driver still does not work properly and the system only starts up in basic graphics mode. As a consequence, the external display does not work either. Removing “nomodeset” from the kernel boot options results in the same condition as the dnf system upgrade did - display not working, but you can see that both laptop display and external monitor does get garbled output.
Display and power management worked fine under Fedora 40. I have upgraded a few Fedora releases with no issues until 41. The problem with the display is likely the noveau driver not recognizing the MacBook Air hardware. I have Fedora 40 re-installed on my MacBook in the mean time.
If you need any info on the hardware or if you want me to try anything, please let me know. Here is the lspci-v info run in Fedora 40:
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation MCP89 [GeForce 320M] (rev a2) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
Subsystem: Apple Inc. Device 00d4
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 26
Memory at d2000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
Memory at c0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
Memory at d0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=32M]
I/O ports at 1000 [size=128]
Expansion ROM at d3000000 [disabled] [size=128K]
Capabilities: [60] Power Management version 3
Capabilities: [68] MSI: Enable+ Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+
Capabilities: [e0] Vendor Specific Information: Len=14 <?>
Kernel driver in use: nouveau
Kernel modules: nouveau