[SOLVED]Shut down during/after pacman upgrade - help unbreaking things

ttshaw1 · 2022-10-25 01:34:19

I have a KDE Plasma-based install on my laptop that's been working for the last year or so. Today I ran pacman -Syu and looked away after confirming the upgrade. After a couple of minutes I looked back down. My screen's backlight was off and I couldn't get it to come on with the laptop function key that's supposed to do that. Though it was hard to see, it looked like what was being displayed was a login page for Xfce, which I was trying out at one point and never uninstalled. I powered the system down with the power button.

On boot, instead of logging me in automatically and starting Plasma Wayland, I'm now sat at the terminal. Manually starting the DE doesn't work - startplasma-wayland and startplasma-x11 give no output. Pacman wouldn't update its package lists until I removed the lock file. I can't get online - nmcli gives no output no matter what switches I give. I can start the iwd service, but iwctl gave an error message "Rejected send message, 2 matched rules; ... Failed to retrieve IWD dbus objects, quitting...". Plugging directly into ethernet doesn't seem to change anything.

I'm at a loss right now for how to proceed. How can I figure out what's going on and resolve it? My inclination would be to get into Plasma and then see if its networkmanager utilities can take over and get me online, but I don't have a clue how to do that.

Since I don't have any networking, it's difficult for me to copy paste error messages. I'll probably just take pictures on my phone when it's needed.

Last edited by ttshaw1 (2022-10-25 04:02:33)

cfr · 2022-10-25 01:43:44

Use a live install on a USB key to boot the system, get networking going, mount / etc. and arch-chroot to troubleshoot and post information, such as the relevant part of pacman's log.

mpan · 2022-10-25 02:17:29

If pacman was successful updating local database, but only files belonging to packages were not flushed to storage, you may be lucky with `sudo pacman -Qkkq`. Even from your current system console. This will print files that do not match description from their packages, or are missing. From that you may determine, what packages need to be reinstalled.

The operation takes a while, as it must check metadata of all pacman-managed files.⁽¹⁾ A few mismatches are normal and expected: do not blindly assume that something is wrong. In particular all kernel packages (linux, linux-lts, …) will report mismatches.

____
⁽¹⁾ Skipping the final `-q` will show progress, but you may miss the important information in the noise.

ttshaw1 · 2022-10-25 02:38:21

I have my pacman log showing today's updates and noticed that, among others, plasma-wayland-session, plasma-workspace, xorg-wayland, and networkmanager were among the packages in the fatal upgrade. I tried upgrading each to the latest version in my cache, overwriting all conflicts, and was able to start Plasma. But networkmanager still wasn't working, so I decided to roll back all the packages, following along with the information in https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-rollback … arch-linux . Now Plasma isn't working any more...

I guess the simplest thing to do would be, for each packages I tried installing in the fatal update, to upgrade to the latest version in my cache and overwrite. If that doesn't work then I'll assume there were some secondary effects and it's not just those packages that are broken. Unless someone has a better idea based on the info above, I'll try that once pacman -Qkkq finishes.

ewaller · 2022-10-25 02:38:34

mpan wrote:

...you may be lucky with `sudo pacman -Qkkq`.

I don't think that requires elevated privilege (sudo). It might be possible that some packages might need it, but not many.

ttshaw1 · 2022-10-25 04:01:55

ttshaw1 wrote:

I guess the simplest thing to do would be, for each packages I tried installing in the fatal update, to upgrade to the latest version in my cache and overwrite

After a while spent mashing the log into a list of package filenames, that seems to have worked. Everything seems to be functional, and network manager and SDDM still remember all my settings. I ran pacman -Syu and found an existing file conflict on some python package, so it's possible I'm going to have to periodically overwrite some files as a result of this. But for the most part I seem to be all set.

mpan · 2022-10-25 05:55:52

ewaller wrote:

mpan wrote:
...you may be lucky with `sudo pacman -Qkkq`.
I don't think that requires elevated privilege (sudo). It might be possible that some packages might need it, but not many.

audit, bind, cdrtools, cups, cups-filters, dbus, filesystem, … shall I continue?

ewaller · 2022-10-25 14:17:09

Nope, point made

Arch Linux

#1 2022-10-25 01:34:19

[SOLVED]Shut down during/after pacman upgrade - help unbreaking things

#2 2022-10-25 01:43:44

Re: [SOLVED]Shut down during/after pacman upgrade - help unbreaking things

#3 2022-10-25 02:17:29

Re: [SOLVED]Shut down during/after pacman upgrade - help unbreaking things

#4 2022-10-25 02:38:21

Re: [SOLVED]Shut down during/after pacman upgrade - help unbreaking things

#5 2022-10-25 02:38:34

Re: [SOLVED]Shut down during/after pacman upgrade - help unbreaking things

#6 2022-10-25 04:01:55

Re: [SOLVED]Shut down during/after pacman upgrade - help unbreaking things

#7 2022-10-25 05:55:52

Re: [SOLVED]Shut down during/after pacman upgrade - help unbreaking things

#8 2022-10-25 14:17:09

Re: [SOLVED]Shut down during/after pacman upgrade - help unbreaking things

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