Here's one for your cheat sheet. If you're reading this, I'm succressfully back up on my e-mail after a very serious -- and unexpected -- Fedora 30 failure on my laptop on August 26. When one makes a change to the video display settings, Fedora shouldn't blow up. But that's exactly what it did. I have a 4K display on my ThinkPad P72 driven by an Nvidia Quadro P5000 mobile graphics card. It defaults to a 60 fps refresh rate with the MATE desktop, but there's a 120 fps option in Monitor Preferences. I thought changing that might be an interesting test, but as soon as I hit the Apply button my video vanished completely. I rebooted thinking it would recover. Nope. Fedora would not boot to anything other than single user mode. Nothing I tried could bring it back to life. Steve suggested trying xrandr, but that won't run in text mode. After days of hunting for a fix, I gave up and bought a new 4T notebook drive and an external SATA "toaster" adapter. I used ddrescue to make forensic backups of the four F30 partitions to the external SSD. I re-installed a F30 Workstation image and ran "yum update" to get a generic system. Fortunately a while back (with Steve's help) I'd created the following utility script in /usr/local/bin: # cat rpmlist-stripper.sh #! /bin/sh # This one-liner will generate an alphabized list of RPM packages for use # by a for loop to install the exact same packages on another instance. rpm -qa --qf "%{n}.%{arch}\n" | sort > $1 # end-of-file Using this file in a yum 'for' loop, I was able to restore all of the rpms that had been in the crashed system. There were a couple of dozen other little things that needed to be done, but by this evening I decided to look for an easier way if this ever happens again. And I found it: Sure enough, I found /etc/mate-settings-daemon/xrandr/monitors.xml in the backup of the root filesystem. In it I found the smoking gun: # cat monitors.xml <monitors version="1"> <configuration> <clone>no</clone> <output name="eDP-1"> <vendor>AUO</vendor> <product>0x109b</product> <serial>0x00000000</serial> <width>3840</width> <height>2160</height> <rate>120</rate> <x>0</x> <y>0</y> <rotation>normal</rotation> <reflect_x>no</reflect_x> <reflect_y>no</reflect_y> <primary>yes</primary> </output> <output name="HDMI-1"> </output> <output name="DP-1"> </output> <output name="DP-2"> </output> <output name="DP-3"> </output> </configuration> </monitors> Had I known where it was two weeks ago, I could have edited that <rate> line back to 60 in single user mode. The thread suggests all that's needed is to delete that file and reboot. Without it, GNOME will start using its defaults. --Doc P.S. That 4T SSD is now installed in my laptop as bulk storage.
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