Fedora 8: select the repositories carefully
A week ago, I installed Fedora 8, from scratch. The installation went fine, I customized the system to my liking, using the default GUI. After a week, however, I could not initialize an X session anymore. And the problem occurred straight after I downloaded the package updates as the system prompted me to do.
The X session would not initialize because of the following error:
X.Org X Server 1.4.0.1
Release Date: 5 September 2007
X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0
Build Operating System: Linux 2.6.20-1.3002.fc6xen i686
Current Operating System: Linux tank.matrix.local 2.6.23.1-49.fc8 #1 SMP Thu Nov 8 21:41:26 EST 2007 i686
Build Date: 13 November 2007 05:47:17PM
Build ID: xorg-x11-server 1.4.99.1-0.10.fc9
Before reporting problems, check http://wiki.x.org
to make sure that you have the latest version.
Module Loader present
Markers: (–) probed, (**) from config file, (==) default setting,
(++) from command line, (!!) notice, (II) informational,
(WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown.
(==) Log file: “/var/log/Xorg.0.log”, Time: Thu Nov 15 22:31:35 2007
(==) Using config file: “/etc/X11/xorg.conf”
dlopen: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers//nvidia_drv.so: undefined symbol: xf86GetPciVideoInfo
(EE) Failed to load /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers//nvidia_drv.so
(EE) Failed to load module “nvidia” (loader failed, 7)
(EE) No drivers available.Fatal server error:
no screens found
giving up.
xinit: Connection refused (errno 111): unable to connect to X server
xinit: No such process (errno 3): Server error
I immediately thought that the update broke something related to Nvidia driver, see the undefined symbol above. So I re-installed the driver:
[ikendra@tank][~] sudo yum remove kmod-nvidia
[ikendra@tank][~] sudo yum install kmod-nvidia
This didn’t help and I started to suspect Fedora from releasing a broken update. However, because I have never seen such a major problem after Fedora update, I decided to log on IRC to discuss this with competent people. On the #fedora-qa channel I chatted with a friendly and helpful tester from Fedora, Will Woods. After a few questions, he found the root cause of the problem: I had the fedora-development repository enabled which means that the packages from current development head repository were downloaded. This was easy to be confirmed by issuing
[ikendra@tank][~] cat /var/log/yum.log | grep “fc9″
So it was entirely my mistake. Will asked me, what made me enable the repository at the first place. Good question! I confused fedora-development with fedora-updates-testing – I was interested in the test updates not realizing that I enabled the Rawhide repository. Although I was entirely aware of the fact that the Rawhide cannot be considered stable, I wasn’t aware of the fact I was actually enabling it and the UI did not warn me:
I tried to save the day by disabling the fedora-development repository and issuing…
[ikendra@tank][~] sudo yum install yum-utils
[ikendra@tank][~] package-cleanup –orphans
…to get the list of all fc9 package installed in order to remove them and re-install the fc8 packages – the list was however too long, I will have to reinstall the system. I was glad that Will acknowledged the fact that the repository name “fedora-development” was confusing. It was a good school for me, too, but I could have imagined to spend the evening in a different way! 
