The small linux problem thread

I just need a sanity check, and perhaps suggestions on a better solution. I intended to encrypt the drive when I installed Linux on a new laptop but failed to. I’ve set up quite a lot on there since then and would like to encrypt the drive and restore what’s currently on there with minimal headache. I figured the easiest way to do this would be to use timeshift, add my home directory to the backup, set the target to an external USB drive, and then after wiping and re-installing, restore from the USB drive using timeshift. Thoughts?

I don’t know about that one, however, I have encrypted drives previously by cloning a disk (or imaging it and mounting with -o loop option), formatting the original disk, partitioning the drive (/boot 1GB, /boot/efi 512MB, everything else on the last partition), using LUKS to encrypt it (the third partition), using LVM in LUKS for separate root, home and swap partitions, formatting, mounting the new partitions and volumes, copying files from root, home and boot to their specific directories, then mounting sys, proc and dev in a target mount drive, chrooting into it, running a grub-update, exit, unmount and reboot into the original disk.

Might seem a little weird, but it’s nothing complicated. You can just rsync everything on / except dev, sys, proc, mnt, media and a few other folders to another server or to a ext4 formatted external drive (to maintain the file permissions, which is important).

If you need a tutorial, I can do one.
@Sea_Monkey

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tar ball?

I ended up taking a chance and just using timeshift. When I attempted to restore, I got a segfault. Wasn’t too surprised. rsynced my /home and /etc directory from the timeshift backup and manually installed the software I needed. Accidentally broke my /etc/fstab due to different UUID on the boot drive, but that was easy enough to fix.

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Mouse back and front buttons don’t work in Steam (Manjaro) and the Steam notifications sit on top of the taskbar.

I have a question regarding how DNF resolves dependencies to uninstall…

So, quite a while ago I installed VirtualBox because I was testing things, but I don’t need it anymore. Ever since, my dnf history is getting filled with logs like this:

   531 | -y install --disablerepo=* /tmp/akmods.ZQGtEHp3/results/kmod-Virt | 2020-12-07 01:35 | Install        |    1   

From my understanding, this is a kernel module that’s being installed every time the kernel updates, and that’s fine with me.

Now, not needing VirtualBox anymore I was thinking to just dnf remove VirtualBox, right? That should work. Well, it does, sort of:

[tarulia@localhost]~% sudo dnf remove VirtualBox
Dependencies resolved.
========================================================================================================================
 Package                  Architecture         Version                      Repository                             Size
========================================================================================================================
Removing:
 VirtualBox               x86_64               6.1.26-2.fc33                @rpmfusion-free-updates                54 M

Transaction Summary
========================================================================================================================
Remove  1 Package

Freed space: 54 M
Is this ok [y/N]: N
Operation aborted.

As you can see it doesn’t remove anything else. Now just to make sure that the aforementioned Kernel module really came with VirtualBox, I checked the history:

[tarulia@localhost]~% dnf history info 530
Transaction ID : 530
Begin time     : Mon 07 Dec 2020 01:34:57 CET
Begin rpmdb    : 3043:1e0939ef80a24beb692a19790a1a03786b30b2ea
End time       : Mon 07 Dec 2020 01:35:06 CET (9 seconds)
End rpmdb      : 3057:2681540ddeb1a5f42d09435ce5625fbdb35156cf
User           : Tarulia <tarulia>
Return-Code    : Success
Releasever     : 33
Command Line   : install VirtualBox
Comment        : 
Packages Altered:
    Install elfutils-libelf-devel-0.182-1.fc33.x86_64                       @updates
    Install akmods-0.5.6-26.fc33.noarch                                     @fedora
    Install fakeroot-1.25.2-1.fc33.x86_64                                   @fedora
    Install fakeroot-libs-1.25.2-1.fc33.x86_64                              @fedora
    Install kmodtool-1-41.fc33.noarch                                       @fedora
    Install python3-progressbar2-3.51.4-2.fc33.noarch                       @fedora
    Install python3-requests-download-0.1.2-4.fc33.noarch                   @fedora
    Install python3-utils-2.4.0-2.fc33.noarch                               @fedora
    Install rpmdevtools-9.2-1.fc33.noarch                                   @fedora
    Install xemacs-filesystem-21.5.34-38.20200331hge2ac728aa576.fc33.noarch @fedora
    Install akmod-VirtualBox-6.1.16-1.fc33.x86_64                           @rpmfusion-free-updates
    Install VirtualBox-6.1.16-2.fc33.x86_64                                 @rpmfusion-free-updates
    Install VirtualBox-kmodsrc-6.1.16-2.fc33.noarch                         @rpmfusion-free-updates
    Install VirtualBox-server-6.1.16-2.fc33.x86_64                          @rpmfusion-free-updates
Scriptlet output:
   1 Created symlink /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/akmods.service → /usr/lib/systemd/system/akmods.service.
   2 Created symlink /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/vboxdrv.service → /usr/lib/systemd/system/vboxdrv.service.

And as you can see, it installed a couple dependencies as well, which from my understanding should be removed by dnf remove if they are not used by anything else. So I checked if anything depended on them, and:

[tarulia@localhost]~% sudo dnf remove akmods
Dependencies resolved.
========================================================================================================================
 Package                   Arch        Version                                       Repository                    Size
========================================================================================================================
Removing:
 akmods                    noarch      0.5.6-26.fc33                                 @fedora                       37 k
Removing dependent packages:
 akmod-VirtualBox          x86_64      6.1.26-2.fc33                                 @rpmfusion-free-updates       16 k
Removing unused dependencies:
 VirtualBox-kmodsrc        noarch      6.1.26-2.fc33                                 @rpmfusion-free-updates      857 k
 fakeroot                  x86_64      1.26-4.fc33                                   @updates                     153 k
 fakeroot-libs             x86_64      1.26-4.fc33                                   @updates                     129 k
 kmodtool                  noarch      1-41.fc33                                     @fedora                       18 k
 python3-progressbar2      noarch      3.51.4-2.fc33                                 @fedora                      207 k
 python3-utils             noarch      2.4.0-2.fc33                                  @fedora                      997 k
 rpmdevtools               noarch      9.5-1.fc33                                    @updates                     219 k
 xemacs-filesystem         noarch      21.5.34-38.20200331hge2ac728aa576.fc33        @fedora                        0  

Transaction Summary
========================================================================================================================
Remove  10 Packages

Freed space: 2.6 M
Is this ok [y/N]: N
Operation aborted.

Nothing does. So how come DNF doesn’t uninstall the dependencies that came with VirtualBox?

As per man dnf:

       dnf [options] remove <package-spec>...
              Removes  the specified packages from the system along with any packages depending on the packages being
              removed. Each <spec> can be  either  a  <package-spec>,  which  specifies  a  package  directly,  or  a
              @<group-spec>,  which  specifies an (environment) group which contains it. If clean_requirements_on_re‐
              move is enabled (the default), also removes any dependencies that are no longer needed.

Just to make sure I also checked what my DNF config said about the “default”:

[tarulia@localhost]~% cat /etc/dnf/dnf.conf | grep clean_requirements_on_remove
clean_requirements_on_remove=True

So it should remove the dependencies, but it’s not, and I’m confused. What am I missing here?

No, I think dnf remove <package> removes just the package. dnf autoremove (just like apt autoremove) should remove software that were installed as dependencies and are no longer needed by other programs.
man dnf:

Auto Remove Command

dnf [options] autoremove Removes all “leaf” packages from the system that were originally installed as dependencies of user-installed packages but which are no longer required by any such package.

This command by default does not force a sync of expired metadata. See also Metadata Synchronization .

That’s a bit confusing, but I don’t read it like that because:

       dnf [options] autoremove <spec>...
          This  is  an alias for the Remove Command command with clean_requirements_on_remove set to True. It removes
          the specified packages from the system along with any packages depending on  the  packages  being  removed.
          Each  <spec>  can be either a <package-spec>, which specifies a package directly, or a @<group-spec>, which
          specifies an (environment) group which contains it. It also removes any dependencies  that  are  no  longer
          needed.

Autoremove just sets the clean_requirements_on_remove to true if it is not already, but as per the config file, it is set to true by default. And as per the last post, remove says If clean_requirements_on_remove is enabled (the default), also removes any dependencies that are no longer needed.

That said, I did try autoremove earlier, but it resulted in the same:

[tarulia@localhost]~% sudo dnf autoremove VirtualBox
[sudo] password for tarulia: 
Dependencies resolved.
========================================================================================================================
 Package                  Architecture         Version                      Repository                             Size
========================================================================================================================
Removing:
 VirtualBox               x86_64               6.1.26-2.fc33                @rpmfusion-free-updates                54 M

Transaction Summary
========================================================================================================================
Remove  1 Package

Freed space: 54 M
Is this ok [y/N]: N
Operation aborted.

Try autoremove without anything after it, like I said.
dnf autoremove
And see if this alone detects any leaf packages that need to be removed (not just from VirtualBox, but from everything you installed).

It does detect a ton (160 packages to be precise), but I’m pretty sure if I were to accept uninstalling them, it would brick my system in some places. It actually also lists a couple packages that were manually installed, so IDK what’s happening here…

If you didn’t manually compile stuff, it should be fine, I run autoremove all the time. But obviously do it at your own risk, you know your own system better than my guesses.

Anyway, I don’t have a Fedora install to test stuff on… does:
dnf repoquery --deplist --verbose
generate a dependency tree?

it takes ages but it’s doing stuff…


To be honest, I think DNF somewhere along the way lost track of which packages were installed manually and which were a dependency. When I was preparing for a system-upgrade a while ago I was thinking about doing an install from scratch, so I was trying to get a list of all packages I installed myself (so I could maybe just write a short script I could execute on the new install to install everything in one go).
Anyway, I used dnf history userinstalled (and dnf repoquery --userinstalled) to get that list, but I was met with a whole bunch of packages that I definitely did not ever touch myself (even literally the kernel package … like… yeah no.).


After writing this, the deplist is still not done… is this normal? :thinking:

edit: Took 10 minutes but it did finish, not sure what to read out of it tho, it’s… long (106 MB text file :eyes: )


As for this… well, all I compiled was in mock, so this would be unaffected. But looking through that list it contains (among a lot of other things) wine and syncthing, which I know are 2 things that I installed myself and also are not a dependency of anything, so they shouldn’t be removed by autoremove. A lot of the other things on the list I don’t even know and don’t remember being a dependency, but they very well might be.

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The repoquery deplist thing should be listing every software on your PC and its dependencies. It’s normal to take long. I didn’t expect 106MB though, hot smoke!

You mean through the autoremove list or the --deplist list? Also, maybe try it again without --verbose parameter?

I expect it is every single one, but I obviously didn’t check every entry :stuck_out_tongue:

Sorry, should have specified, I meant the autoremove list

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Yeah, check and see what software you got installed on your machine and compare to what autoremove wants to delete. Other than that, I don’t think I can help (well, I’ve been flinging brown cream at the walls to see what sticks anyway).

Thank you so far nonetheless :slight_smile:

What autoremove wants to remove is one thing though, but that doesn’t really explain the original issue of why remove (or autoremove for that matter) don’t remove the dependencies that were installed alongside VirtualBox.
I honestly think that it is what I mentioned above though, that DNF just lost track of userinstalled packages for whatever reason.

What is odd though is that on the one hand autoremove wants to remove wine, and its depdendencies it installed, even though wine was user-installed. But the same situation is true for VB and that one is not getting removed, which would suggest it does still know VB was user-installed in some capacity.
So even if my theory were correct, something weird is still going on.

I don’t know if there is any way to regenerate DNF’s internal list of userinstalled packages though, by scanning the history or other means…

Hey, does the AMD radeon R9 290 work with the latest kernel? i’m asking this because AMD did drop the support for this card in this year. Just wondering if the kernel driver still carry the legacy support for older cards?

If so, ill be installing some debian based distro on this machine.

Hello, I am new to linux. I have POP OS installed but every time I boot, I have to turn my wifi off then on to get it to work. it will look connected but nothing will load. I did not have this issue with my previous graphics card which seems unrelated. (went from gtx 980 to titan xp)

I am using aorus x570 pro gaming wifi motherboard for the wifi.
ps: ethernet is currently not an option. Any trouble shooting tips are welcome.

According to kernel.org for latest kernel 5.15 (which will be the next LTS kernel):

So, yes. At the very least support continues for another year, for free drivers, which are the ones you most probably want anyway.

Hmm, what does your dmesg say?

Reseating your GPU card could perhaps solve this - A first suspicion is your GPU is sending the same IRQ sequence as your Wifi. If this does not fix it, then a deeper debug is probably in order. Would recommend you start a thread on it if reset doesn’t work. Clearing CMOS might also solve the issue.

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