In the last 12 hours, I have successfully performed the following :
- I manually removed an Nvidia driver that was causing Gnome desktop to crash at the login screen.
- I was able thereafter to boot all the way into a Gnome user and run a terminal from the Application dropdown
- I performed yum update . CentOS updated, cleaned, and validated 1500+ items.
When I boot things look slightly different, due to changes made by yum update. Whereas before , encrypted volume passphrase was requested on a terminal, I new see a GUI form with a white lock icon. I enter my passphrase as usual. THe form vanishes and 15 seconds transpires. THe screen then goes black and the machine hangs.
Here is a dmesg.old (since dmesg itself would only be showing me successfully booting into a terminal).