Rawhide Watch

No input when booting Rawhide of 2010-01-28

adamwill — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 20:35:24 +0000

When booting Rawhide of 2010-01-28, you may hit a tricky situation: absolutely no input at all. In some (possibly all) cases this affects runlevel 3 as well as runlevel 5. This is due to bug #559679: it’s an SELinux problem which prevents HAL starting up (so can cause problems for anything else that still uses HAL, as well).

To fix this problem, you need to install selinux-policy 3.7.8-5 or later (update all selinux-policy packages you have installed, of course). To install them, boot to runlevel 3: add ’3′ to your kernel parameters in grub. If you get no input even at runlevel 3, try deleting ‘rhgb quiet’ from the grub parameters as well. Install the selinux-policy updates, reboot, and input should be working again.

Obviously, if you did not yet update your Rawhide (or you updated but didn’t reboot), make sure when you do update that if you get an older selinux-policy, then install the newer one from Koji before you reboot! That way you’ll avoid hitting the problem.

Nightly LiveCDs not booting

adamwill — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 19:33:00 +0000

Some people are now aware of (and using) the nightly Rawhide live builds. To save time and bandwidth, it should be noted that all nightly builds since 2009-09-18 fail to boot at all, on any hardware, and are hence essentially unusable. We are currently looking into the cause of this problem and hope to have the nightly builds working again soon.

Update 2009-09-24: The initial problem was resolved, but 2009-09-22 and 2009-09-23 nightly builds were affected by a second problem with the same result. We hope that 2009-09-24 builds will finally fix all issues and boot correctly, once they are available (which depends on when the main Rawhide compose is completed).

In the mean time, the latest available working live build is Snap3, which is available at the pre-release download page. This was built from the 2009-09-17 Rawhide tree.

restorecond in policycoreutils-2.0.71-6 breaks the world, how to recover

rawhidewatch — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 20:28:34 +0000

If you were running the restorecond service and upgraded to policycoreutils-2.0.71-6.fc12 then things went horribly wrong. restorecond goes nuts and screws up labels across your filesystem. Logins via ssh or local console breaks among other problems.

Here is how to recover:

Boot into single user mode.
Turn off restorecond service with chkconfig restorecond off
fixfiles restore will fix labels across your entire filesystem.
Reboot into the normal system.
Upgrade to policycoreutils-2.0.71-7.fc12 or later.
chkconfig restorecond on

In related news, you might be having problems with the restorecon command. In the past commands like restorecon -Rv . would relabel the current directory, but now it fails silently. dwalsh says this is a bug he intends to fix. Until it is fixed, you must specify an absolute pathname to the restorecon command.

Rawhide X crashes on startup

rawhidewatch — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 14:13:39 +0000

xorg-x11-server-1.6.99-25* is broken. Upgrade to -27 to fix this problem. This is should be pushed to rawhide before Saturday.

Rawhide 2009/08/05: xulrunner and python-urlgrabber

adamwill — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 21:03:45 +0000

There are two problems in today’s Rawhide. First, xulrunner has been updated, but Firefox (and other Gecko-based applications) have not been rebuilt. If you update to today’s Rawhide and include the updated xulrunner, Firefox (and other Gecko-based applications applications) will not work. If you haven’t updated yet, you can avoid this problem by excluding xulrunner from your update: ‘yum update -x *xulrunner*’. Remember to take this out again once rebuilt Firefox and other packages have gone into Rawhide. If you already got hit by this problem, you need update to the rebuilt Firefox package, but as of the time of this writing, the build has not got through. You can attempt to manually revert xulrunner to its old version, as an alternative.

Secondly, you might find that yum seems unable to download packages properly, getting partway through, failing with a HTTP Error 200 message, trying the next mirror, and failing again. To fix this, update the python-urlgrabber package: ‘yum upgrade python-urlgrabber’.

Blank notification area (systray) workaround

rawhidewatch — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 16:54:07 +0000

Many are experiencing a problem where the notification area (a.k.a. systray, or that place icons like nm-applet appear) being blank in rawhide. The current workaround is to restart notification-area-applet a few times. There is a bug report for this issue. Hopefully this will be fixed soon. Thanks to mclasen for this tip.

Unable to update to rawhide – rpmlib(PayloadIsXz)

rawhidewatch — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 19:17:27 +0000

jlaska wrote:
Trying to update your Fedora 11 (or older) system to the latest rawhide content? You might notice a failure similar to below when attempting to upgrade using yum:

rpmlib(PayloadIsXz) <= 5.2-1 is needed by kernel-PAE-2.6.31-0.107.rc4.git3.fc12.i686
rpmlib(PayloadIsXz) <= 5.2-1 is needed by kernel-firmware-2.6.31-0.107.rc4.git3.fc12.noarch

Turns out that rawhide packages now use XZ (the new LZMA format) as the default payload compression format. The details of this new feature can be found on the XZRpmPayloads feature page. Testers that install directly from Fedora 12 or rawhide should not experience problems. However, folks upgrading from Fedora 11 or from an older rawhide may need to manually workaround this issue using the following commands:

yum --enablerepo=updates-testing update rpm

Once completed, you may continue with the rawhide upgrade:

yum --disablerepo=* --enablerepo=rawhide update

More information on upgrading to rawhide can be found on the wiki.

Happy testing!

Rawhide x86_64 DNS broken? nss-mdns multilib issue

rawhidewatch — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 18:20:48 +0000

Tip of the hat to Will Woods for this tip.

If you're using an x86_64 system (F11 or Rawhide) and having trouble
with DNS (hostname lookups) after recent updates, check to see if you
have nss-mdns.i586 installed *without* nss-mdns.x86_64:

  rpm -q nss-mdns

If so, you should be able to fix name resolution by doing either:

  mv /etc/nsswitch.conf /etc/nsswitch.conf.saved
  mv /etc/nsswitch.conf.bak /etc/nsswitch.conf
  yum install nss-mdns.x86_64

or simply: yum erase nss-mdns

The cause of the problem is a recent change to WINE that made it require
nss-mdns[1]. Since wine is i586-only, the i586 nss-mdns package gets
installed. This is a long-standing bug with multilib support[2] that the
RPM developers are working on. 

[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=492700
[2] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=442047

ssh key-based login to root not working?

rawhidewatch — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 02:03:32 +0000

Is your ssh key-based login to root not working? Solution:

```
chmod 700 /root/.ssh/
```
```
chmod 600 /root/.ssh/authorized_keys
```
```
restorecon -R -v /root/
```

yum-presto Delta RPM support needs testing

rawhidewatch — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 18:17:47 +0000

yum-presto in rawhide now is in need of widespread testing. Presto allows yum to download Delta RPM .drpm files, which contain only the difference between your installed package and the upgraded new version. This allows yum to update packages with significant download bandwidth and time savings.

Please help us verify that yum-presto is working properly. Please test it with both standard yum command line and PackageKit. Simply run yum install yum-presto. No further configurations are necessary. Please report any problems to Bugzilla.