How do I fix this? Freshly upgraded F21 clears logo and leaves screen blank.
Yes, I know F21 is 'end of life', but the author of Fedup always recommended upgrading one level at a time, so I used Fedup to go from F19 to F20, which worked well, then from F20 to F21, which does not. If I let it boot by itself, I see the boot screen with the Fedora logo, the curly 'F', printed then cleared (so far, in the normal manner). But then instead of seeing the graphical login manager, I see the screen go blank and stay there.
Interestingly enough, if I hit Esc during the boot, I can get a console and login there with no obvious problems. Likewise if I edit the Grub line starting with 'linux' to include the runlevel '3' at the end. But then I have no network, which may be an unrelated problem (I suspect SELinux here, since the journal shows permission denied on reaching the socket; but I have tried both disabling SELinux and setting to permissive mode only; neither solved it though the former at least made SELinux errors go away).
Speaking of the journal, I did use "journalctl --no-full --reverse" to try to figure out what was going on, but I am not that sure how to interpret what I am seeing there: I see, for example, errors from X including "(EE) Fatal server error" (EE)" and "(EE) no driver available" but I realize X has long had a lot of unfixed error messages, so I am not sure how seriously to take this one. Nor do I know what to look for to see why the driver is not available; it looked to me like it was available.
I have seen Ask Fedora questions about similar sounding failures, but those were because of Nvidia cards. Mine is Radeon. (In a Lenovo E525).
So what should I be looking for in the journal or in which logs?
Honestly, if you are coming from Fedora 19 and you want to upgrade until you reach a supported version (currently 22 /23), I would recommend you to
The likelyhood you end up with a proper and fast system is higher than upgrading 3 or 4 times.
If even the non graphical console failed, I would do as you say, going ahead with a fresh install. I did a pretty comprehensive backup before the F19 -> F20 upgrade, though I will have to double check about the hidden files. But those are probably still there, since I can access the file system through the console created by Esc during bootup.
But since I can still run Fedora in a console, I am reluctant to give up when I seem so close.
@mejohnsn: I understand.
An easy way to access your files in a graphical environment is through a live cd/dvd/usb. Just boot Fedora from there, mount your existing /home and copy all you need to an external drive. Or if your /home parition is already a separate partition and you are happy with the rest of the partition setup, you should be able to freshly install Fedora 22 and using the existing /home with its content. Just make sure you don't format it during partition setup.
Have you tried running
package-cleanup problemsandpackage-cleanup --cleandupesyet? If nothing else, this will make sure that you don't have any package conflicts causing problems.@sideburns: "package-cleanup problems" is an error, ""package-cleanup --problems" gives a list without modifying anything. Sure, it is suspicious how many packages came up in said list as 'missing requirements'; most of them are packages I never use, but a few such as "libLLVM-3.4()so(64bit)" look suspicious.
Interestingly enough, after executing "package-cleanup", though this failed when it tried to access the network (please recall I did say that was not working), the next time I booted the system with runlevel=3 (i.e., ' 3', at end of "linux...), it did get to network. So some progress.