Created attachment 938490 [details] screen displayed during installation Description of problem: I started F21 Alpha RC1 KDE Live and ran anaconda. After hitting "Begin installation", I see an almost empty screen (see attached screenshot). First I though it was frozen, but accidentally I waited long enough (5-10 minutes) to see the screen switch to "Installation almost complete". In other words, no installation progress is displayed. The screen is simply not there. No progress bar, no changes, nothing. Only after the installation is finished (with the exception of an account configuration), the screen is redrawn. I tested this both in VM and on bare metal with Intel graphics. Same behavior. The problem seems to be in software. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): F21 Alpha RC1 KDE Live anaconda-21.48.6-1.fc21.x86_64 kde-workspace-4.11.11-4.fc21.x86_64 kde-runtime-4.14.0-2.fc21.x86_64 kdelibs-4.14.0-2.fc21.x86_64 How reproducible: seems 100% Steps to Reproduce: 1. run KDE Live 2. start installation 3. see no progress screen 4. wait for installation to finish 5. see screen updated
Created attachment 938491 [details] screen refreshed after installation is over
Proposing as an Alpha Blocker. It seems to "work" in terms of functionality, but it's completely unobvious that it works. The user would probably tried to kill the installation or restart the live image long before the installation would complete. Especially on systems without SSD disk. From this perspective, this seems to be a violation of "installation interfaces" criterion, in this case the GUI one: "When using a dedicated installer image, the installer must be able to complete an installation using the text, graphical and VNC installation interfaces. "
Created attachment 938539 [details] ARM VNC install Similar issue seen with arm vnc installs
Discussed at 2014-09-17 blocker review meeting: http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-blocker-review/2014-09-17/f21-blocker-review.2014-09-17-16.01.log.txt . I tested during the meeting and was unable to reproduce, and Kamil tested again and did not hit the bug this time through either. We agreed that as this seems to be intermittent and isn't a showstopper it's not serious enough to constitute a violation of the criteria, so it's rejected as a blocker, but we'll keep an eye on it and re-review if it seems to be happening a lot during later testing. Also rejected as a freeze exception for now due to the point in the cycle. We will document this for release.
Today I saw another weird thing, I booted KDE and it seemed to be frozen. No matter what I clicked on the desktop, nothing happened. Still picture. But when I switched to VT and back, suddenly I had two installers running. My assumption is that the picture was still, but my actions were real, so I started several applications when I clicked around. This suggests that this is not a bug in anaconda, but rather KDE display manager/plasma/compositor/something itself.
Can you confirm that this also happens with disabled compositor/desktop effects (Alt+Shift+F12 I think) in KWin?
I saw similar symptoms installing TC7, but only near the end of anaconda install where it was supposed to give installation progress feedback. The screen eventually flashed "Finished".
Same problem with the installer on alpha_rc1, I didn't wait for it to show up, just tried moving the mouse over the places where the root and user icons/buttons are, and it worked OK, I was able to set root password, and create new user, but only at the end of install everything returned back to normal.
(In reply to Kamil Páral from comment #5) > Today I saw another weird thing, I booted KDE and it seemed to be frozen. No > matter what I clicked on the desktop, nothing happened. Still picture. But > when I switched to VT and back, suddenly I had two installers running. My > assumption is that the picture was still, but my actions were real, so I > started several applications when I clicked around. > > This suggests that this is not a bug in anaconda, but rather KDE display > manager/plasma/compositor/something itself. If this only happens when interacting with anaconda, then this is anaconda issue, because there is another older bug with "mininal install" (I think) with same symptoms. Or "we" have two different problems here, one anaconda and other kde related?
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 1103496 ***
Like @bitlord said I feel like we are discussing two different problems. 1. Anaconda not displaying text. This happens exclusively after you click begin installation. System remains live and usable. There is no freeze. And no other software seem to be affected this way. 2. KDE screen freezes with a still picture. KDE on Fedora 21 freezes time to time. The screen is replaced with a still picture. This happens in both KDE 4 and Plasma 5. Both Fedora 21 and Fedora 20 run KDE 4.14.2 and Fedora 20 is not affected by this issue which may point to something notorious in Fedora 21 probaby not KDE related. Could this be a problem with Intel graphic drivers? Disabling desktop effects (Alt+Shift+F12) resolves this issue. I have never encountered both of these issues together. Tested with 2014-10-29 KDE Live CD on ThinkPad T420i.
What I see in a VM on KDE looks like always the same thing: the screen stops updating, but the system is still running. Closing the VM window and re-opening it causes it to start updating again.
I will try to install LiveCD again in a VM a few times until I can reproduce this bug and see if it can be resolved by disabling desktop effects. If anyone hits this issue again please try to disable desktop effects with Alt+Shift+F12 and see if that works.
This doesn't sound like a duplicate. On my F21 KDE system installed with daily live right before Beta release, I can reliably reproduce a bug where screen freezes every few hours which can be unfrozen by disabling desktop effects via Alt+Shift+F12.
Also enabling/disabling desktop effects while Anaconda text is missing has no effect on it. Tested with rawhide-20141007 ISO.
The fix for this was a change to KDE's default GTK+ theme - oxygen-gtk3-1.4.1-3.fc21 . If you can reproduce the frozen screen issue in KDE with that version of oxygen-gtk3 installed, it'd make sense to reopen this.