When doing a graphical install of 9.5 via VNC, the VNC window is blank (all grey) i.e. don’t see the usual installer GUI
The mouse pointer changes as it is moved across the window, so the installer GUI is there - but not visible
This doesn’t happen for all installs, works normally if the host is a VM (Nutanix), but doesn’t work for bare metal workstations (with Nvidia GPUs) - although I can’t see why the presence of a GPU has anything to do with VNC - as inst.vnc uses Xvnc
inst.vnc installs were fine on these workstations when installing 9.4 or earlier
Has anyone else had this issue ?
It looks like it is related to the presence of a GPU on the workstation …
If I boot the installer with modprobe.blacklist=nouveau
then the Xvnc display is OK and works fine
I did a bit of digging and it appears it has something to do with the window manager (gnome-kiosk) used by the installer (anaconda)
When booted without the nouveau module being blacklisted, if I then kill the gnome-kiosk process, the standard installer screen appears - although, I can’t do anything more as anaconda, unsurprisingly, reports the disappearance of the window manager as an error …
I also ‘replaced’ gnome-kiosk as the display manager with a simple display manager I found out there (called ‘ratpoison’) - and the installer screen displayed and worked fine over VNC
I have no idea why gnome-kiosk has some dependency on the video driver when being used with Xvnc and why it has this behaviour with the 9.5 installer - as it worked fine with 9.4 and earlier - maybe something has changed with the nouveau driver?