On 10/28/2018 11:07 AM, Orion Poplawski wrote:

 > On 10/28/18 2:24 AM, Yasha Karant wrote:

 >> On 10/27/2018 07:08 PM, Orion Poplawski wrote:

 >>> On 10/27/18 10:42 AM, Yasha Karant wrote:

 >>>> Using yumex, rather than doing a full update to SL 7.5 production, I

 >>>> attempted to update over the network the kernel, firmware, and libgcc,

 >>>> allowing yumex (essentially yum) to establish the needed dependencies

 >>>> (other applications, etc., that also needed to be updated). The

 >>>> resulting kernel will not boot, but merely hangs.  If one waits long

 >>>> enough, the "progress bar" at the bottom of the screen does show the

 >>>> typical blue/white progression, but that is all.  When I reboot and

 >>>> manually select the previous kernel, the system reboots.  I am using

 >>>> MATE for a "control" GUI, although as the system never gets to the

 >>>> login

 >>>> screen, MATE should not be "active".   It appears that yumex (yum)

 >>>> does

 >>>> not fully resolve all required dependencies.  What other components

 >>>> must

 >>>> I update?

 >>>

 >>> Pressing <ESC> should get you the text boot messages which hopefully

 >>> should point you towards what is going wrong - or remove rhgb from the

 >>> kernel command line.

 >>>

 >>>

 >> Following your suggestion, I pressed <ESC> .  Ultimately, the boot hung

 >> at "Waiting for Plymouth boot screen to quit ..."

 >>

 >> Was something misconfigured/misinstalled by the yumex update of the

 >> kernel?

 >>

 >> I did note from the text messages that "Starting Gnome Display Manager"

 >> appeared at multiple steps.

 >>

 >

 > Looks like the X server is failing to start for some reason.  You

 > should be able to ssh into the machine or do ctrl-alt-f2 to get a text

 > login window.  Take a look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log, etc.  If you are

 > using nVidia drivers that's a likely suspect for what went wrong.

 >

You were correct:  downloading via yum the latest elrepo nvidia package

solved that problem, only to reveal that there was no network connection

because iwl firmware needed to be updated. Although the previous SL 7

kernel would not go into Xwindows once the nvidia drivers were updated,

it did support a plain scrolling terminal on F2, etc., and yum update

iwl* as root addressed that issue.  Now the system reboots under the

current SL7 production kernel, the 802.11 network works (including the

security authentication that Network Manager, etc., has stored), and

Xwindows and MATE "work".  Thank you.



P.S.  The comment that one must disable certain GUI booting displays is

correct to get the full on-line text output, but the solution is not

obvious until one RTFM, etc., as there is no "prompt" for such a choice.