28 June 2011

Fedora 15 on Dell XPS 15 (L502)

I recently had to install Fedora on a Dell XPS 15. Unfortunately while installation wasn't a problem getting it to boot for the first time was. I'd previously tried Fedora 14 and found much the same result and was hoping that the issue would just be gone in Fedora 15.

During boot I kept having problems with synchronisation with a number of different error messages like "scheduling while atomic", and "fatal exception in interrupt". This always inevitably lead to the same result Kernel Panic, although a couple of times it did tell me that it was trying by "fixing recursive fault but reboot is needed" although this never seemed to make a difference.

I had an idea that it was one of the kernel modules causing the problem, but I had no idea which, and so by trial and error I eventually determined that it was iwlagn. This fix is then reasonably simple just blacklist the module like so:

#vi /etc/blacklist.conf
+ blacklist iwlagn

Once black listed I found that Fedora booted successfully and I was able to log in.


There is one slight issue that I neglected to mention in the above is how do you manage to edit blacklist.conf, when you can't boot the system. I had a live Ubuntu CD around which I found worked and it was simply a matter of mounting the partition and editing the file.

# sudo apt-get install lvm2
# sudo modprobe dm-mod
# sudo vgchange -ay VolGroup
# sudo mkdir /mnt/fedora
# sudo mount /dev/VolGroup/LogVol01 /mnt/fedora
# sudo vi /mnt/fedora/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

+ blacklist iwlagn

4 comments:

  1. Hello

    I have a DEll XPS L502.

    While fedora installation , I get ttyl not found error.

    Any idea how to solve this ?

    ReplyDelete
  2. No I haven't encountered this error sorry.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hey i use a Dell xps L502x
    it says failure to launch X server/window during boot
    any idea how to solve this?

    ReplyDelete
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