Hey, I am using an Rpi 5b and was having a great time using it.
However, I noticed that my chromium could cause my system to freeze randomly.
In my dumbest moment, I was using chromium while doing a pacman -Syu upgrade, and it froze.
I couldn’t jump to tty nor could I ssh into the machine.
In an even dumber moment, I restarted the machine, hoping that it resolves itself.
But instead, I got DBus failed, similar to this https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=293335.
Various daemon couldn’t start like bluetooth and stuff.
And thus begins the rollercoaster of emotions.
It didn’t except any inputs on that screen, but I was able to switch to TTY.
But the TTY only has a single flashing _ and I was not able to obtain a shell.
Thus, I tried to chroot into the system from my x86 laptop.
From here, I was rather skeptical that it could work.
As this source seems to have failed to do so https://jiangsc.me/2023/10/08/arch-linux-on-rpi3/
But to my surprise, it worked.
I mounted the root partition according to https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/222981.
own3d: ~ > sudo fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 119.08 GiB, 127865454592 bytes, 249737216 sectors
Disk model: SD/MMC
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 46F9061A-CC1F-4A5A-A65B-98D8361921A8
Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/sda1 3906 394531 390626 190.7M Microsoft basic data
/dev/sda2 394532 249737182 249342651 118.9G Linux filesystem
- For some reasons,
fdisklist there is a microsoft basic data partition there? Is this normal? - Other sources told me to mount the boot partition too, but I didn’t do it but still am able to get a
chroot. Am I supposed to do so?
I was able to get chroot via doas arch-chroot /mnt/sdcard/ qemu-aarch64-static /bin/bash.
Follow the instructions as per the other forum post on the Arch wiki https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=293335, I get this messages when I did sudo LC_ALL=C pacman -Qkk 2>&1 | grep -v ', 0 altered files'
But when I tried to fix the broken packages via pacman -S --dbonly PACKAGE (there was a lock file, but I deleted it to proceed), I get errors such as
[root@archie /]# sudo pacman -S --dbonly python
warning: python-3.12.6-1 is up to date -- reinstalling
resolving dependencies...
error: could not open file /var/lib/pacman/local/qt6-webengine-6.7.3-1/desc: No such file or directory
looking for conflicting packages...
Package (1) Old Version New Version Net Change
core/python 3.12.6-1 3.12.6-1 74.80 MiB
Total Installed Size: 74.80 MiB
:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n]
(1/1) checking keys in keyring [----------------------------------------------------] 100%
error: GPGME error: Invalid crypto engine
(1/1) checking package integrity [----------------------------------------------------] 100%
error: GPGME error: Invalid crypto engine
error: python: missing required signature
:: File /var/cache/pacman/pkg/python-3.12.6-1-aarch64.pkg.tar.xz is corrupted (invalid or corrupted package (PGP signature)).
Do you want to delete it? [Y/n]
error: failed to commit transaction (invalid or corrupted package (PGP signature))
Errors occurred, no packages were upgraded.
Does it mean that my pacman is broken due to the error: GPGME error: Invalid crypto engine error?
Even when I told it to delete the invalid package, the same message still appears.
So here is where I am now.
The other sources suggested to proceed to use pacman --root=/mnt since pacman may be broken, but I am skeptical if it would work, since my laptop is x86.
Do I have no option but to re-install my installation. I’d really like to avoid that if possible.
Thanks for any advice in advanced!