After zypper dup TW not booting. Blinking cursor black screen of death

English Install/Boot/Login
1

I’m using an MSI laptop and using Gnome, Wayland. I ran sudo zypper dup this morning as I do every morning. It installed/updated about 500MB of packages. Then I rebooted and it fails to boot. It gets past the GRUB menu to the MSI logo with the spinning wheel underneath the logo. Then it goes to a blank black screen with a blinking cursor in the upper left corner and nothing else. After doing this a few times I got into GRUB menu and tried the previous snapshot before this morning’s zupper dup. That also went to the same black screen of death. Then I tried the snapshot from yesterday. That worked and gave me a successful boot into my system.

So looks like this morning’s zypper dup update got some buggy packages.

Any ideas what’s going on? Any idea which packages are buggy and causing failed boots?

Is there an info page for this buggy update?

Any other details I should provide?

1 Like
2

I just updated in a KVM virtual machine. And it never completed startup.

It looks as if GDM is failing to start.

I rebooted (with CTRL-ALT-DEL), used ‘e’ in the grub screen to boot to level 3. That got me in at a command line. I then switch the displaymanager to SDDM. And it seems to start up normally with SDDM. And, yes, I can login to Gnome using SDDM.

Perhaps this is the same problem as

2 Likes
3

So looks like a buggy update this morning. I’ll wait and not do any zypper dup until it’s fixed.

Thank goodness for snapshots! It’s so nice that a tech noob like me can so easily and quickly rollback from an update that crashes my system.

1 Like
4

A followup.

I looked at the suggestions from the linked post. They suggested removing “/etc/nsswitch.conf”, so that the system reverts to “/usr/etc/nsswitch.conf”.

And that seems to have solved the problem. I’ve switched back to using GDM, and it is now starting up properly.

2 Likes
5

Can I rename “/etc/nsswitch.conf” to “/etc/nsswitch.conf.old”? Would that work?

I’m a tech noob and know very little about using CLI.

If I make this change you suggest and then run sudo zypper dup, will that reverse the change and revert back to the bad state?

(Currently my system is working fine cuz I rolled back to yesterday’s snapshot)

6

Yes, that’s about the equivalent of removing.

I should add that I first did:

diff /usr/etc/nsswitch.conf /etc/nsswitch.conf

to see the differences. The only differences seemed likely to be the ones in the bug report. So removing “/etc/nsswitch.conf” seemed harmless here.

1 Like
7

My intuition is telling me if I make this change to nsswitch.conf and then run zypper dup I’ll end up back with the bad nsswitch. Let me know if I’m misunderstanding.

Seems to me the real solution is to not do any zypper dup until the bugs are fixed. Again, let me know if I’m missing something.

8

If you first do the dup, that will make a new snap, then after that delete or rename the file. Because of the new snap the file will be in there so deleting it after that means if you fail to boot you can simply roll back and also have the file back

9

Normally, an update (i.e. “zypper dup”) should only change “/usr/etc/nsswitch.conf”. The file “/etc/nsswitch.conf” is for the local administrator to modify what comes in “/usr/etc/nsswitch.conf”.

In my case, anything in “/etc/nsswitch.conf” is from before the change to using “/usr/etc/nsswitch.conf”, so I probably didn’t need it.

10

There is at least one package that inserts mdns_minimal and of course it needs to do it in /etc, not in /usr/etc. As long as /usr/etc/nsswitch.conf already has the correct content it should not do any harm though (beyond well known problem of bad modification).

11

moving /etc/nsswitch.conf away worked for my collegue as well.

12

removed , text text text text Is there anyway to delete a post?

13

Did this solution get removed when your colleague did a subsequent zypper dup?

14

I’m trying to rename /etc/nsswitch.conf but it says I don’t have permission. See below.

advait@localhost:~> sudo mv /etc/nsswitch.conf /etc/nsswitch.conf.bak
mv: cannot move '/etc/nsswitch.conf' to '/etc/nsswitch.conf.bak': Read-only file system
advait@localhost:~> ls -l /etc/nsswitch.conf
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 2237 Jan 15  2024 /etc/nsswitch.conf
advait@localhost:~>

(all the commands above are just me copy pasting)

Why am I not able to rename the file? How can I fix this? Googling and AI search not helping.

I’ve never messed around with file permissions and the like. Know nothing about that stuff.

I tried using sudo nautilus and that didn’t work - sudo nautilus admin://

15

Update: I ran sudo zypper dup this morning and again got the same black screen of death. Had to do a hard reboot and revert back to snapshot from 2 days ago.

Hopefully the bugs will get fixed soon. See the post above this for my question and issue.

16

Was this a restart on a snapshot?

Or a reboot in a system rescue?

17

This was a Btrfs rollback using a 2 day old snapshot. More recent snapshots give me a black screen of death.

Have any instructions on how I can get permission to modify that /etc/nsswitch.conf file? I hit a brick wall on that. Google and AI searches not helping.

I don’t know specifically what a “reboot in a system rescue” is.

18

Snapshots are readonly…

You have to revert this snapshot and login again to the now working old version restored by this snapshot.

Or try to boot into the “darknes” and use CTRL+ALT+F3 to go to a terminal and change the file there…

19

Yes. I already did a “sudo snapper rollback” command to lock in the prior snapshot. And then I rebooted. So I’m now on that prior snapshot.

20

So you have now modified the /etc/nsswitch.conf?

And after this updated?