Upgrading to Fedora 18 using Yum - Nouveau causes system freeze?

The documentation for upgrading fedora using yum seems to be much better than before. A very nice script which automates the instructions was terrific. The upgrades of my desktop and the netbook were very smooth. After the upgrade, I installed the Cinnamon desktop as well. It is very nice though I will stick to KDE as I am now comfortable with it.

There was, however, a surprise on the desktop. On booting into Fedora 18, the display vanished and the system hung. The system came up in muti-user mode but not in graphical interface. Gdm was the problem. I switched to kdm. The login screen came and was fine in KDE. However, the system again froze when I tried Cinnamon or Gnome desktops. LXDE worked but the system froze as soon as I started Firefox!

KDE desktop was working with desktop effects disabled. If I enabled them, the desktop froze.

The desktop worked fine with the nomodeset option for booting the kernel. However, it was using the vesa driver. So, the problem is with nouveau driver on "GeForce 6150SE nForce 430" hardware.

Another curious result. The system is working fine with the kernel 3.6.11-1.fc17.x86_64 from fedora 17, which has made it possible to continue with Fedora 18 on the desktop.

Need to reconfirm the problems I faced on the desktop as I did not find a bug report with similar issues.

On Lenovo S10-3, I have so far not faced any issues related to the upgrade.

More on Vesa driver and Intel 845/945 graphics

Switching to Vesa driver did have one problem.

Skype can show the remote video but if I try to enable local video, skype client crashes. With the legacy intel driver, if I disabled remote video and then enabled local video, it would work. Subsequently, the remote video could be enabled and the client would continue to work.

However, we decided to use the netbook for the occasional skype usage on which the video calls work flawlessly.

Arch Linux update and KDE graphics problem with Lenovo S10-3

My last update of Arch Linux affected quite a few packages including updating the kernel to 2.6.36. There was one more issue in addition to the resumption from sleep problem. The additional issue related to graphics effects of KDE.

The edge effect of showing all the windows worked. However, I could not select any of the windows and there was no way to return to a usable window. The display seemed to hang.

I could switch to a tty (ctrl+alt+Fn) and 'pkill ksmserver' to get a new login and start a new desktop session. My workaround was to disable desktop effects until I found the cause.

I rolled back a number of packages which seemed likely, e.g. kernel, mesa, xf86-video-intel. Finally, I located that the culprits were intel-dri and libgl. I had to downgrade both from 7.9-1 to 7.8.2-3.

I also needed to downgrade xf86-video-intel from 2.13.0-4 to 2.12.0-3. The display did not freeze but was very erratic and unstable.