Since it was recommmended way, i did the preupgrade way to go from f14 to f16.

After a surprisingly long time, it was ready to boot to f16, but instead of an X session, i got a jibberish screen.

When I try to go to a terminal by pressing ctrl-Alt-f2, the monitors go to sleep and the keyboard becomes unresponsive.

If I try to go to recovery, when I try to run Xorg -configure, it fails saying that the number of screens does not match the number of devices. It still says this after i clear out xorg.conf.d and rename xorg.conf to xorg.bkp.

I have two monitors and had been using the catalyst drivers. any idea on troubleshooting to get x working? Many thanks.

I haven't tried to do an F14->F16 upgrade, but I've been on the receiving end of my share of X failures when updating, especially in Rawhide.

1. Did you have an xorg.conf file in F14? If you did, it should still work (obviously, YMMV). If you had an xorg.conf file, try removing it.

2. If you didn't have an xorg.conf file, take the xorg.conf.new file generated by the Xorg -configure command, delete anything you don't think belongs, and try using it as your new /etc/X11/xorg.conf file.

3. Head on over to koji and keep downgrading (and/or upgrading) xorg until you find an installable version that works, even if it's tagged for a different release.

4. Use nomodeset on the kernel line when booting to use the default vesa modes your monitors.

Upgrading from 14 to 16 is a bad idea. I don't know who told you it is the "recommended" method but I'm not surprised it took a long time and I'm also not surprised X won't start. It's going to take a lot of doing to get this fixed. My suggestion to you is use a boot disk like RIP to save any data you want to keep -- including configuration files -- to an external drive or USB thumbdrive and then do a clean installation with the Fedora 16 installation DVD. Too much has changed from 14 to 16. Take it from someone who has had the experience. After a very little bit of research I did a clean install and not an upgrade. I'm glad I did. You will be too.

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For those finding this page because they are searching for answers to a similar problem, I feel Fedora 16 is nearly worthless for folks with ATI/AMD video cards. In the past few days, a 12.3 version of the non-free catalyst drivers were released by AMD, and I used rpmfusion's testing repo to try it out, but it brought my system back down.

What I had to do to get a semi-functioning system was to go into the recovery mode and yum erase my catalyst drivers and akmod.

I've been screwing with linux as a dabbler for ~20 years now... I find it interesting that we are still where we are. I don't know what that says about what... maybe it just says I'm getting old.

I wish I had known about the driver issue before "upgrading" and I wish that I had seen an option that would have "upgraded" only to 15.

Maybe a "stoplight" chart on a page somewhere would show yellow or red for major components that don't work yet (even if it is non-free in origin)? Does that exist somewhere already?

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+10

Seconded.

In addition to this, it is a particularly good idea with Fedora, to store your /home on a separate partition or drive. This makes reinstalling a new FC release quicker and easier. You can also set up a cron job to backup relevant config files etc to /home.

Another trick the above cron job could be used for is to parse the output of "rpm -qa" to a file, which could then easily be parsed back to yum on the newly installed system.

Just a couple of idea's I had to make things easier when I got jack of reconfiguring everything ever 6 months.

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