Arch Linux

nilesOien

Member

From: Boulder, CO, USA

Registered: 2015-05-08

Posts: 80

Gnome issues on upgrading

I just now upgraded three systems with "pacman -Syu" as I do every other week. I noticed that a lot of this upgrade seemed to pertain to gnome (gnome-themes-standard was moved to extra/gnome-themes-extra, and after the upgrade the terminal windows had a slightly different appearance). I run gnome.

On one of the systems, the gnome screen lock came on during the upgrade as I didn't look at it for a while. I could not then unlock the screen. It seemed like it was trying to unlock itself every second (the screen was flickering once a second, I could not finish typing the root password to unlock it before my typing was erased, and it was displaying the "Authentication failed" message that gets displayed when a user mistypes their password before I'd typed my password.

I assumed the upgrade was proceeding behind the locked screen, waited long enough for it to finish, then forced a reboot with the power button. After the reboot the user background and screen lock images were no longer selected, so the background was just white, but that was rectified by re-selecting the images in the settings tool.

The other two systems, on which screen lock did not come on during the upgrade, did not have this issue.

Even though the problem was worked around, it was puzzling, so I wanted to mention it.

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-- "Make it as simple as possible, but no simpler" - Albert Einstein

twelveeighty

Member

Registered: 2011-09-04

Posts: 1,456

Re: Gnome issues on upgrading

then forced a reboot with the power button.

That really should have been your absolute last resort. If this happens next time, I recommend to remotely SSH into that machine and review the pacman log to see 1) if pacman has finished and 2) review any errors or manual actions that were required to finish the update. You can then also gracefully reboot the machine remotely.

And, of course, it would still be advised to review the logs now, just in case, even though the machine is operational.