Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 with a side project of the week. Let’s get started!
Surprise! Bad Manjaro update. I seem to be getting them once a year. I rebooted some time last Wednesday, seemingly to a black screen. My first thought this time wasn’t, “Oh, no! What am I going to do?” so much as, “Ugg, I need to refresh my memory on chroot and manual updating with pacman, skills I’ve only used once or twice before.”
No need to go through all the trouble if it’s not actually necessary. Manjaro has a feature where you can boot from one of an installed list of kernels, and I was seeing that list. Every option failed though – the most I ever got was an emergency shell that didn’t aknowledge the keyboard enough to toggle number or caps locks. This install wasn’t going to fix itself.
My first thought was to grab the Debian drive from ButtonMash, but I’d rather not mess up the only known working drive for scanning pictures. Instead, I riffled through my thumb drive collection and located one with Debian 11 install media. I got on Derpy Chips, my other daily driver workstation, and installed balenaEtcher special to safely make a new Manjaro live USB/install media.
During this time, I was researching the problem. Other people were talking about it within the past month, but I didn’t pick up the actual reason – just something about most Linux kernel 5.x versions being incompatible with a change. Do not cite me on this. I also learned a bit about the command:
manjaro-chroot -a
This command came in handy. The actual repair consisted of me booting to the live media, mounting my main Manjaro drive (graphically, even), going over to it in terminal, changing root directory per the above command, and updating with
pacman -Syyu
If it actually did anything, I didn’t discern anything. I rebooted to confirm it was still broken to find things seemingly repaired. Was it ever broken? Did I actually fix it? I may never know. In either case, I installed a 4.x kernel listed under KDE’s system settings program on the off chance my successful reboot was a fluke. A further reboot held true.
Takeaway
This fix was only done within 24 hours and no interactive help because I’ve already knew all of the needed skills already. Unfortunately, as I finish writing this post, more update shenanigans appear to be inbound. It appears a new package conflicts with one called wxgtk-common but doesn’t satisfy wxgtk2’s requirements for it.
Final Question
Were you affected by these or a similar Manjaro update?
I look forward hearing your answers on in the comments below or on my Discord server.