Did an update to Trisquel - and it totally screwed up the system
All I get is a Trisquel login screen which is different from the usual login back before the "upgrade". I log in, it goes to a black screen, then reboots, and puts up the same login screen. This happened on Trisquel 10, and there was no way to fix it, I had to reinstall fresh from the iso. If I have to do it again, I just won't ever upgrade again - unless I feel like losing a lot of work> I'd like to use Trisquel for serious work, but until tis gets worked out, I'll stick with my Mac. Yeah, it's not free, but it works and it's reliable.
I am a translator!
Do you mean, upgrade to Trisquel 11, or just system update? As advertised several times on this forum, Trisquel 10 is end of life, it should not be used anymore. If you do a fresh install, you should do a Trisquel 11 fresh install, not Trisquel 10.
Yes, Avron is correct, we need to know what version of Trisquel you tried to upgrade.
This is the set of packages that are currently waiting for me to upgrade on Trisquel 11:
The following packages will be upgraded:
icedove icedove-gnome-support libc-bin libc-dev-bin libc-devtools libc6 libc6-dbg
libc6-dev libc6-dev-i386 libc6-dev-x32 libc6-i386 libc6-x32 linux-libre locales
python3-requests python3-update-manager update-manager update-manager-core
xul-ext-lightning
19 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 211 MB of archives.
After this operation, 567 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] n
Abort.
Do you know if you upgraded a similar set of libc6 packages on Trisquel 11, or something different on Trisquel 10?
As I recall, I did try to upgrade a similar set on Trisquel 11 (not 10).
I did an initial installation of Trisquel 11, and an upgrade of certain packages was offered, and I accepted and started the upgrade. When it finished, the system did a re-boot, which failed numerous times with the results I've stated. The recovery options do not seem to work, the formatting is screwed up. So I'm about to wipe out what I have and do a fresh install of Trisquel 11 after reinitializing. If that's the case, I won't be doing any "upgrades" until Trisquel 12 is available. I'm running Guix as package manager, that upgrades with no difficulty - so I may just stick to that and leave Trisquel alone, no upgrades.
How much free space you have in your root directory? Maybe you are a victim of "Volume group "vgtrisquel" not found" Maybe this can help you: https://trisquel.info/en/wiki/how-resize-trisquels-default-encrypted-partitions I hope the next trisquel default disk configuration of Trisquel contain bigger root partition.
I don't use encrypted partitions.
got into the root shell, now to find the system logs... found them, the one from today, the currrent boot, is empty, from the boot I did yesterday, which stopped at the login at the GUI, the last message is "Started System Logging Service" and all of the messages up to and including that have an OK status
Have you tried creating a new user and seeing if it experiences the same issues?
did that with useradd, and set passwd, but just for the fun of it, I got into my usual home directory after seeing that the user directory I'd created had in fact been created, and I found a new file in my usual home directory - .xsession-errors - and at the bottom of that file I found these errors:
dbind-warning AT-SPI error returning accessibility bus address: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply: Did not receive a reply. Possible reasons include ...
mate-session:1001 GLib-GIO-CRITICAL g_settings_schema_source_lookup assertion 'source != NULL' failed,
mate-session-check-accelerated:1128
dbind-warning AT-SPI error returning accessibility bus address: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply: Did not receive a reply. Possible reasons include ...
mate-session:1001 GLib-GIO-Error: no GSettings schemas are installed on the system ... aborting
---------------
so I'm betting that this is what is happening, so the thing to do is to find out whatever and wherever freedesktop is, and get rid of it and references to it...
Do you have gsettings-desktop-schemas installed? The error message seems to state no Gsettings Schemas were found.
To check in terminal:
dpkg --list gsettings-desktop-schemas
Did that, got this:
Desired = Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status = Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/half-inst/trig-aWait/trig-pend
| /Err? = (none)/Reinst-required (Status, Err: uppercase = bad)
|| Name Version Architecture Description
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
gsettings-desktop-schemas 42.0-1ubuntu1 all GSettings desktop-wide schemas
so what's going on here - did the desktop settings schemas not get downloaded all of the way? Do I need to reinstall them? If so, how?
And the current version is at least 48.0 - https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gsettings-desktop-schemas/-/tree/main?ref_type=heads
It does look like it is installed.
'un' would mean it is uninstalled.
Below the 'ii' say it is installed.:
ii gsettings-desktop-schemas 42.0-1ubuntu1 all GSettings desktop-wide schemas
Trisquel uses the long term release from upstream Ubuntu, and these packages are not outdated, but earlier version than bleeding edge versions like you found. This helps to make it a stable distribution as we depend on software packages that are more tested.
I decided to test out a virtual environment by uninstalling gsettings-desktop-schemas to see what happens, but I did not see the error in .xsession-errors but it gives me a only the background and if I wait it pops up a terminal in the upper right corner.
did that with useradd, and set passwd, but just for the fun of it, I got into my usual home directory
I do not understand if you successfully logged into the account you created with useradd (by the way, adduser is easier to use). There may be a personal (not a system) configuration, probably in ~/.config, of a program starting when you open your session that crashes X. If so, you could just rename with mv (rather than remove; to then be able to recover configurations) ~/.config. If logging in a text session (such as the one obtained with Ctrl+Alt+F3) works, you do not even need an additional user or a live system to do that.
I think the problem came from getting hacked/ having malware inserted at some point along the way, the installation was only a week old, but at some point I added some files suggested in the GUIX documentation, and then did the Trisquel update, and things went south after that. I looked in my usual home directory, and wrote down all the file and directory names, and then did the same for the user I created using useradd, and compared the two. I found a directory in my usual home directory that was not in the new one, .electrum, and found that two directories were in the new user directory, .theme and .icon, that were missing from my usual home directory.
Looking in .electrum, I found a number of files, one of which contained the following addresses:
btc.xskys.net
electrum5.hodlister.co
electrum.qtornado.com
Another, recent_servers, had the following:
electrum5.hodlister5.co:50002:s
blockstream.info:700:s
.config had a huge long address in it and a bunch of other stuff
So I figured I'd been hacked by Bitcoin scum, and went ahead and erased the drive the system was on, reinitialized it, and I'm putting Triquel 11 back on it, and then Guix - and then I'll check from time to time to see if any odd directories pop up - same case after any update or adding new software. I'll have things documented so I can make a full report to the Cybercrime people at FBI. I've done that before with phishing scams, bitcoiners are just another kind of scammers.
did that, using useradd -k /etc/skel -m
and that user account works OK - more or less - but checking the .xsession-errors log, there are lots of errors, and that may account for the clunky interface. It could be that lots of the errors are downstream from that FreeDesktop crap - lots of errors from that - those people who put that garbage out should be skinned alive. What I think I'll do is move the files I've put on the user accounts onto an external drive, wipe the internal drive and install fresh - but this shows that the troubles do not come from the Trisquel update, but from some junk code from outside - FreeDesktop.
Instead of bitching about FreeDesktop without even knowing if its software is involved in your problems, you could, as I suggested you, rename ~/.config, see if it allows you to log into your account, and, if that works, then move back, half by half, what is in the renamed directory to ~/.config and, in this way, discover what personal configuration crashes your session. The system looks fine, since not all users suffer from the same issue.
Tried that. No dice, still doesn't work. Any other ideas? And since FreeDesktop shows up in the error message:
"dbind-warning AT-SPI error returning accessibility bus address: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply: Did not receive a reply. Possible reasons include ...
mate-session:1001 GLib-GIO-CRITICAL g_settings_schema_source_lookup assertion 'source != NULL' failed,
mate-session-check-accelerated:1128
dbind-warning AT-SPI error returning accessibility bus address: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply: Did not receive a reply. Possible reasons include ...
mate-session:1001 GLib-GIO-Error: no GSettings schemas are installed on the system ... aborting"
- freedesktop.org definitely has something to do with this...
Looks like this is a common and longstanding error: https://github.com/waydroid/waydroid/issues/1046 and I've seen no fix. I think the solution is to initialize the drive and start over from scratch, and avoid freedesktop like the plague, so far as I'm concerned, it's malware.
No, it has not:
D-Bus is an inter-process communication mechanism—a medium for local communication between processes running on the same host.
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/IntroductionToDBus/
D-Bus only communicates the error.
so it looks like the error is in a half-configured half-installed package - gsettings-desktop-schemas -
from one of the error messages - GLib-GIO-Error: no GSettings schemas are installed on the system so I did this: dpkg --list gsettings-desktop-schemas and got
"| Status = Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/half-inst/trig-aWait/trig-pend
| /Err? = (none)/Reinst-required (Status, Err: uppercase = bad)
|| Name Version Architecture Description
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
gsettings-desktop-schemas 42.0-1ubuntu1 all GSettings desktop-wide schemas"
so the fix is to remove gsettings-desktop-schemas and reinstall it, so I did that using dpkg --remove --ignore-depends gsettings... (because there were about 10 dependencies)
and reinstall gsettings... using apt install gsettings-desktop-schemas - and no luck even with --fix-missing option set. Files couldn't be fetched due to the mirror for gsettings-desktop-schemas_42.0-1ubuntu1_all.deb being temporarily unavailable - I'll bet that that's what screwed up the initial installation, errors don't get fixed or "solved", people just move on... plus there was an internal error - "ordering was unable to handle the media swap"
and I don't see where to go from here, it looks like the system is irreversibly munged and so the fix is to start over, no way I can fix the internal error.
Checked var/syslog, the system appears to be running OK, except for the GUI which puts up pretty pictures and non-working GUI login prompts. GUIX is still there. Using df, I get: Root is 65% used, /run, /run/lock, /boot/efi are all 1% used, and /home is 4% used - so plenty of space.
I don't know if this is what MagicBanana meant, but you can get into a terminal by pressing control alt and a function key like F1 through F12.
Then you are in a terminal.
You can login your user and figure stuff out that way.
Also btw, I don't know if freedesktop has something to do with that. It wouldn't surprise me, but there is no certainty that it does.
(I dislike freedesktop stuff too btw for different reasons)
But he does have a point there.
Its usually good to be cautious probably of stating such things if you don't know much about them.
LOL. getting into a terminal is something you can use a pull-down menu in a GUI to get to - I use MATE terminal. Back before the GUI days, you were *at* a terminal, I've been using terminals since I got my first timesharing account in 1978. Back then, you could call a number, whistle into the receiver, and get carrier - I've seen it done.
It looks to me like Linux is dying off here in the US - GNU just got rid of its office, sold off its memorabilia, and is now completely virtual. The closest Unix users group is 300 miles away, and it seems like they have somewhat less than ten members. There's no one to ask questions - I'm on my own, so much as i can figure it.