Unable to launch into GDM after F44 update

Ask Fedora
1

Hello there. I’ve been using Fedora since Sep ‘24 with F42 with no issues so far. However, I tried updating to 44 from 43 yesterday and now I’m stuck with a static terminal cursor after some tinkering.

I am on a dual-boot system on my laptop between Windows 11, and when prompted in GRUB it showed that the initramfs image wasn’t found. After looking through the Fedora forums, I booted into the earlier kernel images (believe it was 7.0.10-100.fc43) and wrote the command dracut -f --regenerate-all, which then let me boot into the F44 kernel (7.0.10-201.fc44)

However, the terminal cursor persists and it cannot launch into the GDM. TTY would sometimes even freeze up and not allow me to login (I had to enable secure boot in order for me to log in to the TTY for the F44 kernel). It should also be known that I had some apps that I needed to use X11 to work better, but knowing that X11 is getting old and deprecated with future GNOME/Fedora builds, I thought of removing the X11 WM entirely but that didn’t solve the issue.

When running sudo dnf update —refresh, I also realised that the gnome-shell package cannot be updated with the error “Installed package gnome-shell-background-logo-50.1.1.fc44.noarch requires gnome-shell(api) = 50, but none of the providers can be installed”.

Some context of my machine: it’s a 2021 Acer Swift X with Ryzen 7 5800U and an RTX 3050. I am also able to collect logs with journalctl and my system info.

Not sure what the problem is here, and I hopefully do not need to perform any system restores as I have pretty important academic stuff… Appreciate any help towards this topic. Thanks in advance.

2

This sounds similar to this user’s issue where the upgrade was half-done.

Particularly, that suggests your upgrade to Fedora 44 / GNOME 50 didn’t fully complete.

Try this from the TTY (this is what fixed it for the user in the linked thread)

sudo dnf distro-sync \
    --refresh \
    --releasever=44 \
    --allowerasing \
    --skip-broken \
    --setopt=protected_packages=
3

Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately I do not think it worked, even after reinstalling the 7.0.10-201.fc44 kernel.

Running the distro-sync command returned “Nothing to do.”.

4

If you set to login in gnome xorg there is problem because f44 default to wayland Best what you can do run to grub menu select kernel and with ‘e’ edit boot entry.After ‘rhgb quiet’ add 3 and boot to tty login with your user and do:
XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland dbus-run-session gnome-session
to run gnome on wayland.Once you enter gnome you can add copr repo to install gnome on xorg https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/frantisekz/GNOME-X11/ just follow instructions .I hope this give you some idea what is going on.

5

Thanks for the reply and suggestion. I just decided to remove the whole copr repository for X11 and now the problem is solved after reinstalling the kernel and doing distro-sync in TTY.

Since I do not really need to use the applications that require X11 that often, I might reinstall the copr repository when I need it in the future. Thanks for all the help.

6

This may have been fixed by what you already did, but, I noticed the NVIDIA driver wasn’t being loaded in your log. So may wanna make sure it is being loaded now, if your intent was to use it.

7

Hey, yes I was aware of this as I was able to only launch into TTY with secure boot enabled, which disabled the NVIDIA drivers (or, falling back to nouveau). Disabling secure boot only showed me a flashing terminal cursor and I wasn’t able to launch into TTY.

I’ve now disabled secure boot and have verified that the NVIDIA driver is working with nvidia-smi.

8

I see, cool. Just in case you want to want to use Secure Boot with NVIDIA, it’s actually not very difficult. The instructions are here: https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/Secure%20Boot