Arch Linux

Serge2702

Member

From: México City

Registered: 2014-01-14

Posts: 73

[Solved] My laptop closed session while running pacman -Syu

Hello, I have a weird question. Today I used pacman -Syu and it reported some very important updates, like Linux kernel 3.12.7-2 and Xorg. While it was downloading files I left my laptop unattended (I know that I shouldn't have done that ). After 30 minutes I found that gnome closed session automatically after 10 minutes (I forgot to disable that). I couldn't login again in GDM because everything was flickering, so I had to press the button to login as another user. After that I logged in normally. The Terminal was closed so I couldn't see if it had downloaded all the packages correctly. I rebooted my laptop and everything is working perfectly fine.

And that's where I have this weird question: How I can know that everything is truly fine? Running pacman -Syu again reports that everything is up to date. I checked manually the version number of some upgraded packages and it coincides with the latest version. Is there a way to know if everything is really ok, or I shouldn't worry because everything works fine?

Last edited by Serge2702 (2014-01-15 03:17:32)

esko997

Member

From: Connecticut, USA

Registered: 2014-01-13

Posts: 22

Re: [Solved] My laptop closed session while running pacman -Syu

I don't think I'm really all that qualified to answer you question here as I'm pretty new to Arch myself so take the follow with a grain of salt I guess.

That being said, if pacman is reflecting that everything is up to date, and everything is working, I wouldnt worry about it. I would just say carry on using as normal and if problems do arise cross that bridge when you get there.

Cheers,

Esko

headkase

Member

Registered: 2011-12-06

Posts: 1,977

Re: [Solved] My laptop closed session while running pacman -Syu

This isn't about verifying your packages but rather something to do on future updates so this situation does not occur again.  Hold down both the Control and Alt keys and then press one of the function keys.  Each key is a virtual terminal and usually Function Key 7 is your graphical environment to get back to GNOME.  Switch to one of those text terminals , log in, and do your updates in that.  No matter what happens in GNOME it will not affect one of those.

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 19,822

Re: [Solved] My laptop closed session while running pacman -Syu

I would venture that you are okay.  Gnome is really touchy -- so much so that I no longer even try it on my machine.  It probably was upset when something on which it depends was updated whilst it was running.  Follow headkase's suggestion next time.

You can always go read /var/log/pacman.log and see what pacman wrote there while the update was happening.

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Serge2702

Member

From: México City

Registered: 2014-01-14

Posts: 73

Re: [Solved] My laptop closed session while running pacman -Syu

Thank you for your answers. I'll use ctrl+alt+F2 next time. This is the text in pacman.log:

[2014-01-13 21:46] [PACMAN] Running 'pacman -Syu --needed'
[2014-01-13 21:46] [PACMAN] synchronizing package lists
[2014-01-13 21:47] [PACMAN] starting full system upgrade
[2014-01-13 22:21] [PACMAN] upgraded libgcrypt (1.5.3-1 -> 1.6.0-1)
[2014-01-13 22:21] [PACMAN] upgraded cryptsetup (1.6.3-1 -> 1.6.3-2)
#etc etc etc
[2014-01-13 22:23] [PACMAN] upgraded xorg-server (1.14.5-2 -> 1.15.0-5)
[2014-01-13 22:23] [PACMAN] upgraded yelp (3.10.1-1 -> 3.10.1-2)

That's when I attempted to log in, and rebooted. Immediately after that:

[2014-01-13 22:25] [PACMAN] Running 'pacman -Syu --needed'
[2014-01-13 22:25] [PACMAN] synchronizing package lists
[2014-01-13 22:25] [PACMAN] starting full system upgrade

So there isn't any error messages. Maybe through sheer luck I rebooted my computer exactly when it finished the upgrade or maybe it didn't have the time to write the errors in the log,  Who knows :S

berbae

Member

From: France

Registered: 2007-02-12

Posts: 1,302

Re: [Solved] My laptop closed session while running pacman -Syu

You can check the packages with the '-Qk' or '-Qkk' option of pacman.
You can specify a list of packages to verify or verify all your installed packages.

Kartious

Member

From: UK

Registered: 2013-03-23

Posts: 311

Re: [Solved] My laptop closed session while running pacman -Syu

If the pacman.log reports not errors you should be fine, beside this also can depend on when the issue also has appeared.  If someone developed random system problems while the packages are downloading nothing will be affected regarding the upgrading process apart from perhaps a few corrupted packages which you can remove and then download again. If this happens during the upgrade procedure depending on what is being upgraded can either cause a simple program breakage to possibly being unable to boot.

When ever you get problems after updating always look at the pacman.log to see what / where it has gone wrong or which package upgrade that has caused the breakage (as you can downgrade t attempt to remedy the issue)

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Serge2702

Member

From: México City

Registered: 2014-01-14

Posts: 73

Re: [Solved] My laptop closed session while running pacman -Syu

Thank you for the info. Well, everything is running fine, I've used pacman -Qk and it doesn't report anything wrong, and I've used pacman -Syu two times without problems.