The system booted to the text-only login after removing orphan packages

Support
1

Not sure what happened. I upgraded and removed orphaned packages. The add/remove software asked for an upgrade, and upon reboot, the system booted to the text-only login.

I could start X with startx, and I managed to discover that gdm package was gone. I reinstalled it and all seems normal now, but it was quite scary…

> inxi                                                             ✔ 
CPU: 8-core AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX with Radeon Graphics (-MT MCP-)
speed/min/max: 1382/1200/4679 MHz Kernel: 6.4.9-1-MANJARO x86_64 Up: 4m
Mem: 3.8/30.78 GiB (12.4%) Storage: 3.64 TiB (35.4% used) Procs: 421
Shell: Zsh inxi: 3.3.29

If I can give more info, please ask. Notice that some of the “the graphical interface has disappeared” could be related to this…

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Once upon a time, Manjaro had many meta-packages for system stuff, that installed necessary stuff as dependencies to them. Those meta-packages got removed and replaced with groups for whatever reason, leaving some important stuff as “orphans”.

2 Likes
3

Yep, I supposed something similar. Is there any place with a log of the removed orphans so that I can check if I removed something vital in the process?
Thanks

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The log is in /var/log/pacman.log

1 Like
5

It might be easier to simply boot into a live environment, chroot into our installation, and run a full sync again…

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Thanks. jupyter-nootebook was gone too. I’ll be more careful in the future…

1 Like
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It might be easier to simply boot into a live environment, chroot into our installation, and run a full sync again…

Hmmm. Were I can find the instruction for that? Now the package manager is happy… I am new to Manjaro; coming from Ubuntu — but I started with Linux a bit of time ago, around 1992, with Slackware… so I can manage shell prompt.

8

one kind soul created this tool mapare ( Manjaro Package Restore) for exactly this situation.

2 Likes
9

Interesting. Is it possible to use it to just list the missing packages? (You know, when you get burned, even cold water seems dangerous…)

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yes. ./mapare -i -p
you can check other options with -h

it’s even my preferred method of use of this tool, because I have replaced many parts myself and don’t want to install them back using this tool. like ufw/gufw with firewalld; pulseaudio with pipewire; vi with vim; etc. just to check once in a while what packages I am missing from the “default” current installation package selection. also removed some of the default installed stuff that I don’t want at all into my system, like intel-ucode (because AMD), memtest86+ (because I use uefi), grub-btrfs (because not using btrfs)…

1 Like
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Ah, thanks. That’s ok. I for example have

exfatprogs 1.2.1-1
intel-ucode 20230808-1
memtest86+-efi 6.20-1
ttf-inconsolata 1:3.000-3
gnome-tour 44.0-2
totem 43.0-2
gnome-shell-maia 44.3-1
kvantum 1.0.10-1
kvantum-manjaro 0.13.5+5+g0179d45-1
qt5ct 1.7-1
qt6ct 0.8-6
manjaro-browser-settings 20220522-1

I have doubt about intel-ucode for example; I am on a Ryzen machine so I suspect that’s correctly not installed. Investigating…

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it just gives you the list of missing packages from your current installation compared to the “current default” being installed by fresh install. “current default” usually changes in time; also most probably you have yourself removed or replaced some stuff that you didn’t need…

1 Like
13

Theres a number of packages that are provided with the images that are not necessary for every system.
The ucodes are an example - both intel and amd are included so that either is used in either case.
Or any number of video packages - this intel system for example had xf86-video-nouveau, xf86-video-amdgpu, xf86-video-ati included.
As also mentioned theres just things you simply may have wanted to remove - manjaro-browser-settings for example that just runs hooks every browser update to hijack the bookmarks and do some manjaro branding.

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Very useful tool this mapare indeed, thank you @cscs.