Fedora Core 6 upgrade = kernel panic

My trusty home server has been running Fedora Core 2 for years now. I recently picked up a few differet OSes on DVD from frozentech.com, since they offer fantastic prices, and it's just plain less hassle than downloading and burning my own ISOs. They do nice labeling on thei discs, too.

Anyhow, one of the DVDs I picked up was a Fedora Core 6 install DVD. I have never done a Fedora upgrade before, having always done a clean install instead. Yesterday, I decided to see how easy an upgrade was. Well, it's pretty easy. I booted from the DVD, and eventually got hit with something like "Upgrade existing Fedora Core install?". I answered "Yes", and oh, what, an hour later, the computer was ready for the reboot after completion.

I reboot, and ka-bam, get a kernel panic. Fine. I reboot again. Kernel panic. I reboot and pick the original kernel. Kernel panic. Now I'm the guy starting to panic. I wasn't worried about losing data, but I didn't relish having to hassle with rebuilding my server's settings after an unwanted clean install.

Well, I googled around, and found the answer. http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=554637 which although not dealing with an upgrade, did answer the problem. SELinux, or Security Enhanced Linux, is apparently activated during the upgrade process. Unfortunately, I wasn't using SELinux prior to the upgrade. So, in a way that seems very Microsoft, the good Fedora folks decided they would do me a favor and activate SELinux. I couldn't boot the server up anymore, so I suppose it was indeed hack-proof and totally secure.

So I get in, fix /boot/grub/grub.conf so it has selinux=0 at the end, and take a look around at FC6. Well, I forgot what they call it, but the "launcher" button to get to your apps, etc. is gone! There isn't any way, apparently, to launch anything. You gotta click on an empty portion of toolbar, pick "New Toolbar item" (something like that), and choose "Program Launcher" (something like that) and add it back on. Whacky.

So far, I'm thinking "Next time, just do a clean install..."