On saturday/sunday I’ve applied a whole bunch of updates from byzantium (around 188) and shutdown the computer after work was done.
Today - on monday - I’m getting the “An error occured, which can’t be fixed from the system - contact your systemadministrator” (roughly translated from german) and the gnome shell doesn’t start.
Interestingly installing another dm doesn’t work either, tried XFCE (lightdm) - it just hangs and crashes as well, so it seems, it has something to do with a wayland component, rather than the shell itself…
This is a known transitional problem during the upgrade from GNOME
Shell and gnome-desktop3 3.34.x to 3.36.x. It will be resolved when
the transition finishes (probably sometime in the next 1 to 2 days),
but there is nothing that the maintainers of individual packages can do
about it right now.
Besides downgrading / frankendebian hacks, there seems nothing to be done but waiting for the upstream situation to resolve itself and PureOS taking it over. Tried the same (switch to lightdm) to no avail. Kind of annoying but a risk of the bleeding edge, I guess.
For now I managed to set the terminal font to a huge size (using instructions here: https://askubuntu.com/a/173221/12241) to make it readable at all on a 4k monitor and am using Linux old-school style
Which leads to a totally different question: I thought that the packages taken to the PureOS repos are more (amber) or less (byzantinum) well tested. The described error sounds like that any test would have revealed it?
@jeremiah, did I misunderstand that? I’m actually thinking about switching to byzantinum, but maybe my imagination about how it should work is wrong.
Was this fixed for anyone yet? I’ve noticed a few more upgraded packages in Byzantrium since when running apt update && apt dist-upgrade (even some gnome things like gnome-terminal), but gdm3 still doesn’t start here.
I’m not an expert on this, would it be possible to use Debian Testing repositories as they update and add the software needed for PureOS over that? What need PureOS nowadays to be PureOS?
Thanks for your answer.
hi @jeremiah ! in the latest Debian testing i can’t raise the “network connections” front end under GNOME by typing in the CLI nm-connection-editor as non-root-user nor as root-user it’s simply not there … neither is pppoeconf
is this situation the same under PureOS Byzantium ?
i know i shouldn’t be asking this since testing-ANYTHING is recommended to be run under a virtual environment and not directly on bare-metal … but … could you oblige ?
Having backups and another system ready to boot on an USB drive, I don’t care encountering occasional breakage with a testing or bleeding edge distribution, other than the little extra time and loss of comfort it may create. Until this issue with Gnome, I’ve been very happy with updates in Byzantium, e.g. LibreOffice 6.4.
I’m sorry to be too busy with my daily job in this period to help deeply troubleshoot this issue; I’m unsure I could update today without breaking Gnome, as choosing the following dependency conflict mitigation in Aptitude would lead to a cohabitation between two installed versions of libgnome-desktop (3.18 and 3.19):
I’m thinking of not updating my main PureOS installation until the dependency confilcts to be solved in Gnome core and the transition from 3.34 to 3.36 to be almost complete.
Fixed it.
Downloaded manually the packages libgirepository-1.0-1_1.64.1-1, libgjs0g_1.64.1-3_amd64.deb and gjs_1.64.1-3_amd64.deb from https://software.pureos.net/suites, installed it via sudo dpkg -i PACKAGENAME, made an sudo apt --fix-broken install afterwards and upgraded via sudo apt upgrade normally.
I tried that, now apt --fix-broken install wants to remove: gdm3 pureos-desktop pureos-gnome
This seems like a bad idea? Did you go ahead? If so, what do you use as display manager now?
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