Xorg not usable after upgrading to CentOS 5 from 4.5 manually

July 22, 2007 in the late evening · Filed under centos, centos5, linux

Last night I attempted to upgrade my CentOS 4.5 desktop to CentOS 5 and was met with miserable failure. ‘yum upgrade’ path failed due to abysmal dependency resolution. Upgrade by booting up with a CentOS 5 dvd-rom failed mysteriously with a big ERROR pop-up window just when the installer finished transfer installation image to the disk. I can only vaguely recall of this kinda trouble/misery when upgrading a RHL 5.2 desktop to RHL 6.0, or something ancient like that.

Following an article on how to upgrade to CentOS 5 from CentOS 4.4 serverCD installation, I manually upgraded quite some packages before resume the ‘yum upgrade’ path. It worked, not with little coercing. Now, however, at first boot, GDM looks funny. Every letter on the screen is now displayed as a rectangle. Same for a X user session, with all desktop items labeled with rectangles instead of letters. I suspected some font problems and overwrote quite some. no luck!
all letters now displayed as rectangles in GDM and Xorg user session, after manual upgrade to CentOS 5 from 4.5

The shell session works fine, so I guess I am OK for now. The next thing logical/easy thing to try I guess I can do is to remove the whole X window yumgroup then add it back on.

9 Comments »

  1. experts8 said,

    July 27, 2007 @ 8:32 pm

    I found some clues in errors logged when gnome-session is started. To capture the errors, I added a file named .Xclients in my home directory. It has only one line:
    exec /usr/bin/gnome-session 2>> ~/x.err

    Errors found in x.err were:

    (gnome-panel:2511): Pango-WARNING **: No builtin or dynamically
loaded modules were found. Pango will not work correctly.
This probably means there was an error in the creation of:
  '/etc/pango/pango.modules'
You should create this file by running pango-querymodules.

(gnome-panel:2511): Pango-WARNING **: pango_shape called with bad font, expect ugly output

(gnome-panel:2511): Pango-WARNING **: pango_font_get_glyph_extents called with bad font, expect ugly output

** (nm-applet:2532): WARNING **:        nma_dbus_init (): nma_dbus_init() could not acquire its service.  dbus_bus_acquire_service() says: 'Connection":1.5" is not allowed to own the service "org.freedesktop.NetworkManagerInfo" due to SELinux policy'

    The ‘ugly output’ sounds on the point! so, I checked the errors related to pango first. Sure enough, I don’t have /etc/pango/pango.modules! However, I don’t have pango-querymodules either. Instead, the upgraded CentOS 5 server does have pango-querymodules-32 instead. - First clue that something was aged.

    I reinstalled all pango packages then restarted X windows. no go. A query to list files provided by pango package (rpm -ql pango) shows that the pango.modules does exist, though under a different path at /etc/pango/i386-redhat-linux-gnu/pango.modules. The latter matches output by pango-querymodules-32.

    Now the dbus error looks suspicious. So, I listed all rpms with dbus in their names. I was surprised that dbus package was listed twice with a much older version.

    dbus-0.22-12.EL.9
dbus-x11-1.0.0-6.el5
dbus-python-0.70-7.el5
dbus-1.0.0-6.el5
dbus-glib-0.70-5

    Pretty sure dbus-1.0.0-6.el5 should be the new one for CentOS 5 (RHEL 5, thus the el5 release tag). So, I deleted the old one by ‘rpm -e dbus-0.22-12.EL.9′ then restarted X window by ‘killall -TERM gdm-binary’…

    Bingo!

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