I did an update about 10 days ago and the system hangs on boot - I can get in in recover mode and going through the journal the only thing I can find that is abnormal is this :
system is tainted : unmerged bin
From what I can glean it is something to do with symlinks to folders
In / there are the following symlinks :
/bin which points to /usr/bin
/lib which points to /usr/lib
/lib64 which points to /usr/lib64
/sbin which points to /usr/sbin
In usr/bin I have found a symlink labelled “X11” which is configured to point to “.” - click on it, and it opens an evidently fictitious folder X11 which contains the contents of usr/bin. I hope I"m being clear here…
I’m hoping that it’s just a question of sorting out the symlinks - I don’t know what else I can do to diagnose the problem.
I deleted the X11 - probably find it’s indispensable for some reason…
I do have virtualbox installed, but no nvidia (stuck with Radeon, precisely because they see to be problematic). Virtualbox has been problematic recently, but it hasn’t caused the boot to hang.
I just don’t know how to find out what’s happening.
Yea, there’s search hits found in quite a few websites. Found at an LWN article:
systemd now generates a new “taint” string “unmerged-bin” for systems that have /usr/bin/ and /usr/sbin/ separate. It’s generally recommended to make the latter a symlink to the former these days.
I also read a couple of bug reports at Debian and Fedora about that systemd message, but they both closed the bug report as “wont fix”.
But this is completely unrelated to the boot issues. The message system is tainted : unmerged bin does not prevent booting. It is a red herring in this case…
@myswtest - yes, I found the Debian bug report, with a very blunt reply !
@hui It could well be that - symptoms are the same.
Do I simply comment out “quiet splash” or leave it empty? - if it’s existence is so you can have a pretty picture while it’s booting, it’s a waste of time (though I suppose it might have some spurious value in a corporate setup)
I looked at bootloader options in Yast and there is no way to edit the lines in Grub - I’ll have to do a little research and do it via Konsole.
While I was in Yast, I had a look at my Snapper images and it’s the one pre 18/11 that I can use - so it is indeed the Plymouth bug that’s causing the problem
Can I completely disable Plymouth via “systemctl disable” - what effect would it have ? KDE via sddm handles the login screen (I think)
I’m so incompetent I should probably be in Leap, but the versions available of the programs I use are way out of date in Leap…