Common F29 bugs

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This page documents common bugs in Fedora 29 and, if available, fixes or workarounds for these problems. If you find your problem in this page, do not file a bug for it, unless otherwise instructed. Where appropriate, a reference to the current bug(s) in Bugzilla is included.

Pre-release version
Fedora 29 has not yet been released. During this pre-release period, this page will cover known issues in the Fedora 29 pre-releases. Issues that are fixed will be removed from the page once a fix is available (for instance, an issue that affects the Beta but is fixed in the final release will be removed at the time of that release).

Release Notes

Read the F29_Beta_release_announcement for specific information about changes in Fedora 29 and other general information.

My bug is not listed

Not every bug is listed in this page, but Bugzilla should be a comprehensive database of known bugs. This page is a sampling of the bugs most commonly discussed on our mailing lists and forums.

To see if your bug has already been reported, you can search Bugzilla. If it has not yet been reported, we encourage you to do so to help improve Fedora for yourself and others. A guide to Bugs and feature requests has been prepared to assist you.

If you believe an already-reported bug report should be added to this page because it is commonly encountered, you can:

• Add it yourself, if you have wiki access. Common bugs instructions provides guidance on how to add an entry to the page correctly, but the most important thing is to make sure that the bug is listed - don't worry if you don't get the format quite right, we can clean it up later.
• Or, add the CommonBugs keyword to the bug report. Someone from the QA team will then inspect the issue to determine whether the bug should be listed as a common bug. To expedite your request, please add a comment to the bug that includes
  1. a summary of the problem
  2. any known workarounds
  3. an assessment on the impact to Fedora users

For reference, you can query Bugzilla for bugs tagged CommonBugs:

• CommonBugs? (bugs with CommonBugs keyword, but do not yet have a link to this page)
• CommonBugs+(bugs with CommonBugs keyword and contain a link to this page)

Upgrade issues

GNOME Software in Fedora 27 does not offer upgrade to Fedora 29 even after enabling unstable release upgrades

link to this item - Bugzilla: #1628497

Testing has shown that Fedora 27's GNOME Software will not offer an upgrade directly to Fedora 29, even if you enable the gsettings org.gnome.software show-upgrade-prerelease key that should allow this to happen.

If you are simply trying to upgrade to Fedora 29 and don't really mind how it happens, you have two obvious choices. You can simply upgrade to Fedora 28 and then from 28 to 29 via GNOME Software, or you can do the upgrade in one go using dnf instead of GNOME Software, following the DNF_system_upgrade instructions.

If you are specifically attempting to test GNOME Software upgrade from 27 to 29, you should be able to force the option to appear by doing the following. Exit GNOME Software, then edit the file ~/.cache/gnome-software/fedora-pkgdb-collections/fedora.json. Remove the entire dict for Fedora 28, and/or set Fedora 29's status to Active instead of Under Development. Run GNOME Software again, and it should offer you the upgrade to Fedora 29 instead of 28. You may have to attempt this a few times, as GNOME Software will sometimes re-download the file in question and hence restore it to its original state.

Core system issues

Package management tools (dnf, GNOME Software etc.) can crash when more than one runs at once

link to this item - Bugzilla: #1631533

The version of libdnf included in Fedora 29 introduces a database called 'swdb' which is intended to replace old, tool-specific databases like the yum/DNF history database, with the intention that all package management tools will share a common view of the transaction history and so on. However, it seems that multiple processes attempting to access this database simultaneously may not queue in an orderly fashion, or exit cleanly, but crash with an error message like Exec failed: database is locked. So far, this issue has been reproduced with one dnf process and one pkcon process, and also with two dnf processes.

To the best of our current knowledge, this problem cannot result in partially-completed transactions or inconsistent databases, as the process that crashes should not have actually made any changes to anything yet. However, as any crash in a package manager is undesirable and worrying, we are working to resolve this as soon as possible.

To "work around" it for now, simply retry the transaction that failed. Once the other transaction has completed, it should succeed. If the other process is one you ran yourself, it should be easy to identify, but it may be harder if it is an automatically-scheduled update or something along those lines.

Workstation (GNOME) Issues

GNOME may crash on switch back from virtual terminal under X.org with multiple displays

link to this item - Bugzilla: #1630367

Some testers have reported that GNOME may crash on a system with multiple displays, running GNOME under X.org (rather than Wayland), if the user switches to a VT (console) and then switches back again. So far this bug has been reported to affect Lenovo Thinkpad T460s, T470s and T480s laptops, and a desktop with a Radeon R7-based graphics card, with various display configurations.

If you are affected by a problem like this, the most obvious workaround is to run on Wayland instead of X.org, if you can. If you must use X.org, we can only advise that you avoid using virtual terminals until this can be investigated and resolved.