Bugs related to GTK+ 3.15.4: White text in Firefox, shrinking GNOME Terminals

A major GTK+ 3 update landed in Rawhide recently, and there are at least a couple of fairly prominent bugs related to it. Lots of text in the Firefox interface – on tab titles, menus, buttons, and things – is now white on grey, which is ugly-to-borderline-unreadable. Also, GNOME terminal windows are now extremely prone to shrinking when focused or unfocused, or when you create and close tabs.

Both bugs have been reported and should be addressed soon:

* Firefox white text bug
* GNOME Terminal shrink bug

so you may want to copy yourself on those bug reports to follow progress. In the meantime, you might want to drop back to GTK+ 3.15.3, or perhaps just switch to a different Terminal app and live with the white text in Firefox.

Fedora 21 package signing: no, it’s not just you

We interrupt this Rawhide blog to bring you an important message!

No, it’s not just you: there are unsigned packages in Fedora 21, and yum (and dnf and mock) are complaining about it.

Here’s what’s going on.

When we branch Branched (in this case, F21) from Rawhide, we don’t immediately enable Bodhi – that is, the process where builds have to be sent to Bodhi which sends them to updates-testing and then to stable after review. For the first few days, Branched package submission works just like Rawhide – the packager submits the build, it gets built by Koji, and it’s automatically pulled into the ‘stable’ repo at the next nightly compose. No updates-testing, no karma.

When the package submission process is working like that, package signing still won’t be 100%. We can only get package signing to 100% when the Bodhi workflow is active.

Bodhi gets turned on when we do the Alpha release freeze. Usually, that’s very soon after branching – like, a week. So there’s a slightly confused week where we do the branch and then run around updating fedora-release and mock configs and so on and the freeze hits and Bodhi gets turned on somewhere in there and after a few days it all shakes out and everything’s running smoothly.

What with Fedora.next and all, the period between Fedora 21 branching and Bodhi being turned on is getting much longer. We’re not really at a point where it makes any sense to freeze for Alpha, so Bodhi isn’t getting turned on, and that means not all packages are getting signed.

So yes, relax, it’s not just you. For right now, please use the –nogpgcheck parameter for Fedora 21 yum and dnf and mock and so forth. We’ll try to send out updates to fedora-repos and mock that will turn off gpgcheck for the next little while, until we freeze and enable Bodhi. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.

Fedora 21 / 22: The Branchening

So, today Fedora 21 branched from Rawhide, and Rawhide is now what will ultimately become Fedora 22.

For any puny weaklings who want to track Fedora 21 and not Fedora 22, I posted up a handy guide. For real men, real women, and real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri who want to stick with Rawhide, no action is needed: just keep updating. Everyone else, your blog reading privileges are revoked.

Nightly boot.iso fails to boot

Recent nightly Rawhide boot.iso network install images are failing to boot due to a bug in util-linux. The fix has already been identified and pushed upstream, and should work its way downstream into Fedora soon. This doesn’t appear to be affecting the nightly live images.

Slightly older boot.iso images, if you have one lying around, may not suffer from that bug, but probably do suffer from this one, which is caused by metacity (the window manager used by non-live install images) failing to run due to excessive pruning of the anaconda environment. A fix for that bug was also pushed today. With any luck, once the util-linux fix comes downstream, we’ll get working nightlies again.

3.16 kernels broken on i686 up until rc2 (affects installed systems and nightly images)

There was a significant bug in all 3.16 kernels affecting the i686 architecture (32-bit Intel) only. This resulted in all sorts of breakage higher up the stack – dbus would not run, for a start, which causes many other problems. Installed systems might just limp to a console login; of nightly images, both lives and boot.iso images failed to boot fully.

The cause of this was recently identified and a fix submitted upstream. The fix has been pulled into Rawhide immediately, starting with kernel-3.16.0-0.rc2.git0.1.fc21. All 3.16 kernels prior to that should not be used on i686 machines, or you should pass the kernel parameter vdso=0 to work around the bug.

Nightly images should start working again (or, at least, not be broken by this particular bug…) starting from tomorrow, as the fixed kernel is pulled in.

GNOME fail (again) thanks to libevdev 0.6-1

A couple of days ago, a new libevdev build, 0.6-1, was sent to Rawhide. It changed the ABI of libevdev.so.1 by dropping some ‘deprecated’ functions, without bumping the library version (soname). Unfortunately, clutter was still using these ‘deprecated’ functions: upstream clutter git had been updated to use the replacement functions, but no release had yet been cut with this change, and it had not been backported to Fedora.

This meant that if you installed libevdev-0.6-1.fc21, GNOME would fail to start up, with gnome-shell reporting a failure in clutter:

gnome-shell: symbol lookup error: /lib64/libclutter-1.0.so.0: undefined symbol: LIBEVDEV_READ_NORMAL


We’ve now sent out a libevdev-0.6-2.fc21 build which restores the dropped functions, and also a clutter-1.16.2-4.fc21 build which backports the fix to use the replacement functions, thus fixing the bug from both ends for extra safety. If you’re currently suffering from this bug, updating libevdev, clutter or both should resolve it.

SELinux execmem and execstack denials for everything, and GNOME not running

So hey, this blog still exists!

For this author (AdamW), there are two major issues in Rawhide currently. SELinux appears to be denying ‘execmem’ and ‘execstack’ access to all sorts of stuff – this is affecting dhclient (stopping networking working), sshd, sssd (for those of us who use FreeIPA authentication), cups and several other things. I haven’t looked into what caused this exactly yet, but booting with enforcing=0 is likely to be a requirement for Rawhide users until it gets figured out. Bugs filed so far are #1046112 and #1045682.

Also for this author, GNOME currently fails to run at all. GDM doesn’t start, and if I boot to runlevel 3 and run startx I get an extremely broken GNOME session with Shell not running and windows all over the shop. For now, I’ve switched to Xfce. I suspect this is because about half of GNOME 3.11.3 got built before most of the desktop team left for the holidays, but again don’t have precise details yet. We may be able to get it fixed up with the help of any desktop folks who are still around.

Update on GNOME: turns out it just needs a new gsettings-desktop-schemas build. That is now in progress – grab that when it’s done, and GNOME should work again, with all other components at their latest Rawhide level.

No input when booting Rawhide of 2010-01-28

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

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.

Rawhide X crashes on startup

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.