!WSL woes, destructive update --- agk's diary 6 March 2025 @ 14:42 UTC --- written on X61 with hp vf15 monitor, model m keys in the kitchen in despair --- Okay, I'm a reckless idiot. Biennial note to self: I'm a GNU/Linux/BSD user, I never did admin tasks frequently enough to be able to recover well from errors. With great power comes great responsibility that I don't want. First, Evy and daughter are out of town overnight, visiting Evy's mom after a surgery. I don't have work or family to keep me away from time-sink ideas. And I miss those two. I took a picture with my iPad. It's five years old and I never made an apple account for it because I don't make FAANG accounts. I needed to send the pic to an overseas vendor in order to buy a medication because I don't have health insurance. Of course the picture from the iPad was too big to send via my email, which also isn't FAANG. That's great, actually. Wasting bandwidth and storage un- necessarily is a sin. The only way I know to resize pictures is with Imagemagick. I was using Evy's palmtop, and decided it would be trivialy easy to enable WSL1 on it. Her build of Windows 10 is too old for WSL2 but who cares. On my 2016 GPD Win 1, this was easy. Turn on the WSL feature, restart, install Alpine distro from Microsoft Store without an account, because I don't make Big Tech accounts. On Evy's 2019 GPD MicroPC, I turned on the feature, restarted, and when I opened the Store and searched for Alpine, I was presented with a blank screen with no "get" button. The forums said to get an image from somewhere, but that limited me to Ubuntu and Debian, no Alpine. I installed Debian and it can't upgrade and install imagemagick because: sleep: cannot read realtime clock: Invalid argument dpkg: error processing package libc6:amd64 (--configure): installed libc6:amd64 package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit ststus 1 The forums said it was a known problem with Debian and Ubuntu in WSL. I wasted too much time, gave up, moved the picture over to the Pineboook Pro, and resized and sent it. Bad choices I had updates on my mind, and was curious why the Pinebook Pro was a couple release versions behind despite always saying "there is nothing to do" when I did my regular sudo pacman -Syu I mucked around in the forums. I decided to give 'er a jolt by changing branch to testing. I never would have done this if I wasn't alone and a little stir crazy. I safeguard the stability of that laptop. It doesn't have an ethernet port and it's Manjaro on ARM64. I should be conservative with it. If I break it, the forums may not help. I broke it. There were conflicts doing the upgrade after switching branches, and untangling it meant messing with a dependency hell. I removed three tranches of software, with plans to reinstall after the upgrade. rasqal redland raptor abiword aiksaurus enchant goffice graphicsmagick gsfonts gtkmathview hunspell lasem libgsf libical libots librevenge libwmf libwpd libwpd libwpg libwps link-grammar loudmouth psiconv t1lib wv and all texlive and pdflatex stuff I think this first tranche was no problem. I got rid of orphans and their configuration files with pacman -Qdtq | pacman -Rns - I also got rid of two python packages, which I probably shouldn't have, that I found with pacman -Qqd | pacman -Rsu --print - I just wanted my system to update and install the new dillo browser release from January to look at a picture of Gopher ICU's HF rig. It was taking too long, I had other things to do today. While I don't know much about the internals of Debian's dpkg, I know nothing about arch and Manjaro's pacman and was doing less than minimal due diligence. So, in tranche 2 I got more reckless. There were conflicts with pamac, the Manjaro software updater. I ripped it out, removing: pamac-cli pamac-gtk pamac-tray-icon-plasma and along with them some more important things: archlinux-appstream-data dbus-glib gssdp gst-plugins-bad-libs gtk4 gupnp gupnp-igd libadwaita libnice I was able to reinstall all these after switching branches and upgrading except the three pamac programs. Pacman can't resolve two library dependencies: libpamac libalpm.so Finally to resolve the last conflict I removed the third tranche: gobject-introspection-runtime pythongobject firewalld Disaster After rebooting, I couldn't boot into a graphical environment anymore, even after restoring all the non-pamac programs from the second tranche. I couldn't reinstall the three pamac programs or any of the third tranche programs. I couldn't get online with nmcli or nmtui. After entering my password both nm clients hesitate then report: Error: Connection activation failed: Secrets were required, but not provided. I can't plug in an ethernet cable because I can't find the USB-C to ethernet dongle I used a few years ago in nursing school, or the one I got for Evy a few months ago. So of course no mirrors can resolve. Western Lent began. Computer is broken. Anna's sad. Time to buy groceries. Why I break things? Why?