Oh NO! No GDM with Fedora 19 July 12th update!

Ok that doesn't sound good... yes, that is what I noticed, I was at 2:00 am doing some work of university, I decided to update fedora while I do my work. Then, I restarted my pc when finished work, everything looked normal in booting process (no errors, no warnings in plymouth informative mode), until I noticed that gdm never showed up...  Ten minutes after nothing changed, there was no pointer, no graphics, only plumouth animation finished. The worst thing is that I couldn't even acces to another virtual terminals (pressing Ctrl + Alt + Fx)... Ok, this wasn't happening before I updated Fedora.

This is my screen... nothing else I could do, not even able to access to virtual terminals

Fortunately, I had an empty USB which I converted to a fedora live usb to enter to my system using chroot (love this command, with this command you can become root of another linux directory in a terminal, see more of what I did here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2/Installing#via_ChRoot) and also I created this little script to automatically mount all system devices before executing chroot

modprobe dm-mod

vgchange -ay

mount /dev/virtualvolumename/root /mnt/

mount /dev/bootpartition /mnt/boot/

for i in /dev /dev/pts /proc /sys /run; do mount -B $i /mnt$i; done

chroot /mnt

After rooted as normal user the first thing I tried to do is to downgrade to previous update, but I didn't noticed before that I did this update with DNF, and by some reason I couldn't go to any kind of log or history of latest updated packages... not even with yum.

Ok, next thing I tried to do is to review logs, what ever log I could find useful, and I found this on /var/log/messages:

Jul 13 20:34:04 haks gdm[537]: GdmLocalDisplayFactory: maximum number of X display failures reached: check X server log for errors

 When I saw this message, I just remembered that when plymouth finished to load, screen blinked about 6 times and then plymouth got frozen. That means that X was trying to load at first tty (virtual terminal) but something went wrong and then it continued with next tty, also failed, and that way successively until 6 ttys got over... that was confirmed in forum posts like this http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=265558

That took me to /var/log/Xorg.0.log, in that file I noticed this error:

[    29.066] (EE) Failed to load module "nv" (module does not exist, 0)

That means... nvidia???? Ok, my laptop has an nvidia graphic card, but in fedora (or linux in general) I cannot use it because a terrible abomination created by nvidia called Optimus >.< so I never tried to install an nvidia driver before, so why X server is asking this to Fedora?

Nevermind, X Server is not behaving correctly, and that happened after last fedora update, so I tried downgrading only X server, and the right package is xorg-x11-server-Xorg (thanks to potty for finding this) so in my chroot enviroment I tried this

yum downgrade xorg-x11-server-Xorg

I still don't know why but that fixed this issue, I would recomend to to this just as a workarround, as it doesn't happen to all (in fact, potty also updated his computer without having this problem... although  he says it does :D  )

Thanks for reading, if you know something else please comment it.

HakS