Fedora 19 freezes after login

Question

I have been using F19 for a couple of days until I've decided to do an yum update. Everything went well but after reboot I can't get past the login screen anymore. I enter my username/password, then the login screen disappears and Fedora freezes, displaying only the login screen background image. I've tried logging in through terminal Ctrl+Alt+F3 but after entering my details the terminal just hangs and I can't do anything (I can input commands but there's no reaction).

Do you have any idea how to fix this?

Answer 1

My comment was a little long so I'm putting it in an answer; although I have NOT had to do this myself, it's where I would start.

1) Check if there is a previous kernel listed on the grub boot menu. If so, try that one. If that works, all you have to do is edit /boot/grub2/grub.config here:

set default="0"

The 0 is relative to the first entry, so if you want to use the next one down instead, change it to "1".

2) If that does not work, there is the possibility of rolling back an update using yum. It looks to me like the basic idea is you use yum history list to view a table of recent activities (works for me), then you can use yum undo [N] where N is an ID index from the table.

Of course for that, you at least need to be able to boot in to a terminal. If you can ssh, you could try that. If there is a "rescue mode" option in your grub menu, try that. Otherwise, boot a live CD and mount your partition so you can change from a graphical boot to a console boot (might help...). That means changing the /etc/systemd/system/default.target symlink, which right now is to /usr/lib/systemd/system/graphical.target. As root:

rm /etc/systemd/system/default.target
ln -s /usr/lib/systemd/system/multi-user.target /etc/systemd/system/default.target

And reboot...

Answer 2

Because you can't log in at the console either, it seems likely that something is wrong in your user account.

The first step is to log in as root. If you've set and know the root password, of course, this is easy. Otherwise, boot into rescue mode or a livecd and reset it.

GUI root login is a little scary, and we want to reduce complication anyway, so I suggest doing this at a terminal as well. If you can log into the root user account, you can look at the logs (try the new journalctl command) for any obvious problems. (I think it's likely that you'll see something there.) Another good step would be to create a new test account with some throw-away username and password — can you log in as that user?

This will help you narrow down to whether this is a system problem or a problem with your own account.