Anthony Horton

Upgrading Fedora on my home desktop PC last night was a bit more exciting than usual. It's a bit of a Ship of Theseus PC and has gone through several hardware upgrades and many, many incremental distro upgrades since the last clean install, which appears to have been Fedora 31 from way back in 2019. These upgrades have generally gone smoothly, but after running the upgrade from Fedora 42 to 43 I was left with a computer where GDM would crash on startup, leaving me with an unresponsive black screen instead of a login prompt.

Fortunately a bit of searching led me to the root cause and the fix, and I was able to SSH in and get the machine working again. It's a bit of a corner case that only affects machines that were originally running Fedora 35 or older, and somehow missed the migration to authselect that should have happened automatically when upgrading to Fedora 36: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/gdm-crashes-after-upgrade-to-fedora-43-due-to-authselect-migration/171961

#Fedora #Fedora43

GDM crashes after upgrade to Fedora 43 due to authselect migration

Problem Some systems are experiencing GDM crashes, resulting in the desktop failing to load and the system becoming unusable (no console access, blank display) with the relevant error logged in journalctl: gdm-launch-environment][1722]: PAM unable to dlopen(/usr/lib64/security/pam_lastlog.so): Stack trace of thread 1701: ...snip... username systemd[1]: systemd[1]: systemd-coredump: Deactivated successfully. Cause The GDM crash is caused by the system using an old configuration (non-authselect,...

Fedora Discussion
Feb 23 at 11:17pmWeb
Show threadAnthony HortonFeb 23

While I'm on the subject of Fedora Linux and upgrading things I feel that I should highlight this handy Github Gist: https://gist.github.com/craimasjien/4519283aa2c170b93aff00b9f75aa7bf

Craimasjien has put together a neat little script that makes it easy to install any version of mesa you like in Fedora. It pulls the source from the mesa repos, compiles it to RPMs, and installs them in place of the standard Fedora packages, all with a single command.

You can, if you choose, use this to run a bleeding edge version of mesa but another benefit is that it builds mesa with all the codecs for hardware accelerated video encoding/decoding built in, most of which are missing from the standard Fedora version. These are a must-have IMO, and while you can get full codec support by using the mesa VA and Vulkan driver RPMs from RPM Fusion instead you don't get to choose mesa versions that way.

https://gist.github.com/craimasjien/4519283aa2c170b93aff00b9f75aa7bf

#Fedora

Installing bleeding-edge mesa on Fedora

Installing bleeding-edge mesa on Fedora. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

Gist