For sadism, i wanted to see how badly I could break my system so i decided to run “yum upgrade” via an X session. Rebooted, and saw that my normal loading page was tucked in the top left hand corner. This then dissappeared and gave me green/red lines, noise, etc.

I booted from another Linux OS and trawled through xorg.logs in /var/log/ and found it was struggling to discover my Screen0 for some reason. For fun, i decided to run “yum remove nvidia-x11-xorg..” (cant remember the exact syntax):

xorg-x11-drv-nvidia.i686 : NVIDIA’s proprietary display driver for NVIDIA graphic cards

I then tinkered with rewriting xorg.conf etc and managed to get it back to a running X session, granted at 800×600 (shudder).

I then ran “nvidia-xconfig” to regenerate my xorg.conf for Nvidia now the drivers were re-installed, and then rebooted. Same problem again. Hmm.

After rinse-repeating this process, I twigged the problem – the “xorg-x11-drv-nvidia” drivers were showing as “…2.6.32.12-115” whereas my new kernel was definitely a 2.6.32.14-127. After rebooting and choosing the 2.6.32.12-115 kernel, automagically everything sprang back into life again.

Moral of the story – dont be a feckwit like me and do something like this, but if you do, try and boot from the kernel which matches the version of Nvidia drivers as above.

HTH