Yesterday, I did a system update with pamac. One of the apps would not update (see footnote) so I removed all orphans (in the GUI), thinking I’d run out of disk space as I have on another computer. I had to repeat this a few times before the orphans were all gone. I also did some cleanup ('pamac clean --keep 3" and “pamac clean --build-files”). Then I suspended overnight. Today I returned and could not enter my password. The login screen looked ok but when I typed there was a sort of cursor flash but no characters appeared. I also could not shutdown because the only option under Power was Suspend. So I forced shutdown by holding the power button for a while.
On restart, I only have a console and can type commands but not start up GNOME (I don’t know how to).
I think I removed something that GNOME needs that was registered as an orphan.
Can I get a list of what was removed (pamac history??) and reinstall, or is there another way to repair GNOME?
The alternative is to reinstall everything but I first need to backup /home as I don’t trust my latest backup. I tried mounting an external WD Passport drive that was formatted to work on Windows and Linux (fdisk shows it as HFS/NTFS/exFAT). When I mount it, the mount is owned by root, and when I “rsync -a” to that, all the files are owned by root and have full permissions (-rwxrwxrwx) so it’s not a good sync. Maybe it’s because of the way it’s formatted?
Footnote: the app that wouldn’t update was cisco packttracer which I later remembered I’d set up for a course, so I just removed it. Didn’t think it would cause this much trouble
Microsoft filesystems do not support POSIX file ownership and permissions. By consequence, these are only virtual, and they are set at mount time, through the mount options.
It is a very bad idea to try and back up to a Microsoft filesystem, exactly because all of the POSIX permission-related information will be lost.
Just a suggestion to keep it simple:
you can run the backup of your /home as root - but not with rsync.
Use tar instead - it creates an archive, a single file, the contents of which are not affected by the capabilities and permissions of the underlying file system.
Hi @cscs - this is exactly what I needed. I got hold of the list of deleted programs and reinstalled them, and all is well again! I don’t know which one(s) were the important ones but clearly, removing orphans is not safe. I will approach it with caution in future. I issued this command to fix it but probably didn’t need all of these. I don’t recommend this as a solution for anyone else: I’m only including it here in case someone notices what got deleted and has a look into why fundamentals get deleted as orphans by pamac.
A few things to point out endeavor is not a package in repos or aur.
Also … do not use sudo with pamac.
Never has been, especially if you arent careful to mark packages as explicit, etc.
In the past pamac removed packages using recursive cascade which could be a problem, but i think that was reversed a long time ago.
Always check the package list first before removing.
Ex:
Thanks @Aragorn, I know that using a Windows FS is not a good idea, but I explicitly formatted the drive for general use when I bought it years ago (or so I thought), so my confusion is why fdisk says it’s type HPFS/NTFS/exFAT (I left out the ‘P’ yesterday). Stranger yet, when I mounted from the console (sudo mount /dev/sdc1 /run/media/xyz), then rsync works as I previously described, but when I mount using Nautilus, the permissions are preserved perfectly.
However, I’ll use the tarball method instead. I just need to decide what to backup. I think it’s /home, /etc and /opt, or maybe just /home is enough, since I’m planning to switch from Manjaro GNOME to Manjaro i3wm.
