Was: “Trouble in River City – Rocky Linux 8.5 Rollover Blew Up”
A quick recap from Yesterday:
First I tried jlehtone’s suggestion of running history | grep nvidia – which worked like a charm. When I ran it it gave me two items 1) kmod-nvidia and 2) kmod-nvidia --allowerasing. I then erased kmod-nvidia and did a reinstall. While that did not solve the problem it got me to the point where it wanted to start the login page before it failed with a whole lot of error messaages that ran on and on, and it also gave me the warning that “Nvidia Kernel Module MISSING (!!!) Falling back to Nouveau”.
Second Bobar wrote and said. “You’re not alone. just ran dnf upgrade on RL 8.4 and it is now fubarred ( Had KDE 5.18 and there were Nvidia things in there … on which I gave up eventually - got an old radeon ). Luckily that was on a backup I had restored to a VM (I’m just not a very trusting person).”
Third, while discussing trying an install of Rocky Linux 8.5 and my 2 TB HDD with my buddy, he suggested that I put the DVD1.iso on a 1 TB HDD my sister no longer wanted and sent to me which is used more or less as a scratch drive, rather than on a thumb drive. On a sudden impulse I checked to see what was on there as I thought it was possible I may have put a BACKUP on that drive. I did!!! Unfortunately the BACKUP was of CentOS 8.4, not Rocky Linux 8.4. This gave me the bright idea of trying to “Back Door” my way into Rocky Linux 8.5 by 1) Erasing everything on my 2 TB HDD to have a clean drive for my experiments 2) Copy the BACKUP off the 1TB “scratch disk” to the clean 2 TB HDD 3) Update CentOS 8.4 and in the process roll it over to CentOS 8.5 4) With the idea of converting CentOS 8.5 ==> Rocky Linux 8.5
Fourth. Starting late last night having donned my large Navy Blue Bathrobe with Large Sleeves I started the process and Wiped Out everything on the 2 TB HDD and made it CLEAN! … Then fell asleep! This catches you up to date… so far!!
This morning I proceeded copy the entire CentOS 8.4 file using the dd command to the 2 TB drive. Having done that the next thing I proceeded to do was to boot CentOS 8.4, not once but several times. Each time it popped right up. This way I confirmed I did not have a flaky OS. Having proved that point I next proceed to update – and in effect rollover CentOS 8.4 to 8.5 – over some 2150 files. Hours later the rollover / update was complete. I then proceeded to reboot the machine. IT NEVER HAPPENED!!! Instead what I DID get was the EXACT same thing that occurred with Rocky Linux 8.5. To further prove that I had replicated the problem with Rocky Linux 8.5
Next I followed up by editing the BLUL (Big Long Ugly Line) and logged in as Root, then I issued “startx” which – as with RL 8.5 – dropped me into GNOME. I was able to go wondering around in GNOME all I wished but could not get to KDE. I did get the following message:
“Screen Lock Disabled”.
" Screen Locking requires GNOME Display Manager."
I then proceeded to run jlehtone’s history | grep nvidia. It gave me the exact same output I got on RL 8.5 and a few others including ‘install nvidia-detect’ and ‘nvidia-detect’ as wll as the ones for ‘kmod-nvidia’. I may – or may NOT – have found a clue in the following:
"Updating Subscription Management repositories."
"Unable to read Consumer Identity"
"This system is not registered with an entitlement server. You can use Subscription-Manager to register".
Now correct me if I am WRONG, but this thing about Subscription Management is a Red Hat thing that is limited to RHEL. I should not be forced to “register” my workstation with an “entitlement server”, especially since I am not running RHEL 8.5.
CONCLUSIONS: (So Far)
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This is NOT a faulty or corrupt file which occurred when I updated Rocky Linux 8.4 => 8.5, as I ended up with the EXACT same problems when I rolled over CentOS 8.4 => CentOS 8.5 which was first copied to a CLEAN 2 TB HDD. CentOS 8.4 worked just fine over and over. CentOS (presumably) 8.5 FAILED just as soon as I updated 8.4
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The ERRORS that did pop up were EXACTLY the same between Rocky Linux 8.5 and CentOS 8.5
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I do not have a clue what this jazz is about needing to “registered with an entitlement server. You can use Subscription-Manager to register”. This sounds a lot like Red Hat is trying to FORCE users who use FREE UNSUPPORTED OS’s such as CentOS, Rocky Linux, Alma Linux to use – and pay for – RHEL to avoid the nightmares we are encountering. This may be a drawback to using a bug-for-bug version of RHEL – whatever Red Hat puts into their OS will, by virtue of the beast, get copied into the clones. In short this may be a way for Red Hat to sabotage the clones. …Unless you decide to be a guinea pig for them by signing up to use Fedora or CentOS Streams.
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I have no idea what is going on with KDE and why I can’t bring up a login page when I use to be able to.
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Finally I am not sure what is going on with Nvidia. Nvidia – like KDE – BEFORE the UPDATE, now NEITHER work.
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My hopes of “Back Dooring” into Rocky Linux 8.5 are now pretty much DEAD. Now I go in search of obscure work-arounds.
Future EXPERIMENTS are planned to try and answer these questions.
For those who may wish to dive into the Dark Arts here are the specs for ocelot:
Motherboard: ASUS PRIME X570-Pro
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 3700 MHz 12 core
Memory: 64 GB (Expandable to 128 GB) of GSkill DDR4 2x32 GB Trident Z Neo 3600
DRIVES:
NVMe – Corsair Force MP600 PCIx 4.0 Gen: 1 TB
SSD – Crucial MX500: 1 TB
HHD – Seagate Barracuda 2 TB
Graphics Card: ASUS Nvidia GeGforce GTX 1050 Ti
PSU: Corsair TX750M
OS’s:
Rocky Linux 8.5 (on the 1 TB NVMe Gen 4.0)
openSUSE 15.3 LEAP (on the 1 TB SSD – /dev/sda)
CentOS 8.5 (so far) (on the 2 TB HDD --/dev/sdb)
GUI: KDE Plasma – 5.18
Parts that may be a contributing factor/s: For the most part this is more-or-less a vanilla rig however the CPU (AMD Ryzen 9 5900X); Amount of RAM (64 GB Trident Z Neo 3600; the NVMe Gen 4.0 drive; and while rather vanilla, the Nvidia GeFore GTX 1050Ti graphics card rather than a Radeon graphics Card; and finally I’m running KDE not GNOME. Any and/or of these things may be skewing things up, though I tend to doubt it as CentOS and Rocky Linux 8.4 both worked, and nothing other than the updates has changed.
It would be nice to run this experiment again only with a Radeon Graphics Card to see if that is the problem. I have other vacuous experiments planned. If you have run into any problems that occurred after you updated your system, please post. Please state if you are using KDE /GNOME /Other and if your Graphics card is a Radeon or Nvidia.
D’Cat