I have an installation of Tumbelweed in VirtualBox on a Gentoo Linux host. I had not used it in a long time, and after logging in and updating (zypper up, and then zypper dup) to Tumbleweed 20250209 xorg won’t start. This is clearly because ot the change to not using setuid, but all the relevant posts I’ve found say to uncomment the last line in /etc/persmissions.local. That file has no appropriate line to uncomment. All the commented lines really do look like comments.
First, is that line in that file still the proper way to deal with this, and, if so, can someone provide me with the line to add? If not, what Fine Manual do I seem to have not read?
Thanks.
Never use zypper up on TW zypper dup only May want to be sure you are using active/correct repos. show zypper lr -d
# | Alias | Name | Enabled | GPG Check | Refresh | Keep | Priority | Type | URI | Service
--+----------------------------------+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+---------+-----------+---------+------+----------+--------+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+--------
1 | download.opensuse.org-non-oss | Main Repository (NON-OSS) | Yes | (r ) Yes | Yes | - | 99 | rpm-md | http://download.opensuse.org/tumbleweed/repo/non-oss/ |
2 | download.opensuse.org-oss | Main Repository (OSS) | Yes | (r ) Yes | Yes | - | 99 | rpm-md | http://download.opensuse.org/tumbleweed/repo/oss/ |
3 | download.opensuse.org-tumbleweed | Main Update Repository | Yes | (r ) Yes | Yes | - | 99 | rpm-md | http://download.opensuse.org/update/tumbleweed/ |
4 | openSUSE-20230519-0 | openSUSE-20230519-0 | Yes | (r ) Yes | Yes | - | 99 | rpm-md | http://download.opensuse.org/tumbleweed/repo/oss/ |
5 | repo-debug | openSUSE-Tumbleweed-Debug | No | ---- | ---- | - | 99 | N/A | http://download.opensuse.org/debug/tumbleweed/repo/oss/ |
6 | repo-openh264 | Open H.264 Codec (openSUSE Tumbleweed) | Yes | (r ) Yes | Yes | - | 99 | rpm-md | http://codecs.opensuse.org/openh264/openSUSE_Tumbleweed |
7 | repo-source | openSUSE-Tumbleweed-Source | No | ---- | ---- | - | 99 | N/A | http://download.opensuse.org/source/tumbleweed/repo/oss/ |
8 | windows_mingw_win64 | Cross-toolchain for amd64/PE target format, and Windows packages featuring binaries of that kind (openSUSE_Tumbleweed) | Yes | (r ) Yes | Yes | - | 50 | rpm-md | https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/windows:/mingw:/win64/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/ |
I don’t recall ever manually playing with repos, but as I seem to have set this up over a year ago, with minimal use, it’s possible.
However, I think that message is a red herring. At one point, I had found a message suggesting a problem with the chosen video driver in VB, so I had changed it. Just now, changing it back to VMSVGA, Xorg started correctly (from sddm) but I still have a black screen. However, I’ll consider this resolved, and will start a separate thread if my searching doesn’t help.
Final question - is there someplace official which says zupper up is no good for TW? If that’s really the case, and the system knows it’s running TW, then why not just either give an error or make it actually do zypper dup?
Finally installed lightdm and removed sddm, and things seem to be working. I don’t use this instance often enough to be worth the effort of tracking down what the problem really was, unfortunately.
One might say it’s hidden away in zypper’s official manual:
up is shorthand for update:
update (up) [options] [packagename]
Update installed packages with newer versions, where possible.
dup is shorthand for dist-upgrade:
dist-upgrade (dup) [options]
Perform a distribution upgrade. This command applies the state of (specified) repositories onto the system; upgrades (or even downgrades) installed packages to versions
found in repositories, removes packages that are no longer in the repositories and pose a dependency problem for the upgrade, handles package splits and renames, etc.
“Up” and “dup” quite simply refer to different activities.
Because zypper up works if you know what you are doing. And zypper will warn you when you use up instead of dup to update to a new snapshot:
The following product is going to be upgraded:
openSUSE Tumbleweed 20250124-0 -> 20250220-0
Product 'openSUSE Tumbleweed' requires to be upgraded by calling 'zypper
dup'!
The difference between up and dup
dupwill downgrade packages. It does not happen every day, but it does happen in Tumbleweed (bad package is reverted and replaced by a previous version). It does not happen in a stable release.upprefers to keep existing packages. Wherezypper upwill silently skip a package that cannot be installed due to missing dependencies,zypper dupwill likely present dependency resolution dialogue suggesting removal of some existing packages that block installation. It is not uncommon that packages are split/replaced/refactored in Tumbleweed.zypper dupwill remove packages that are explicitly marked as obsolete. Some will consider it a misfeature though
So, zypper up is more likely to leave Tumbleweed in unforseen inconsistent state when switching between snapshots. But it has its use cases even in Tumbleweed and due to different semantic silently doing dup when requested up is simply wrong.
The development of Tumbleweed happens under assumption that you are performing zypper dup. It is as simple as that.