My Artix install has me questioning my sanity sometimes.
I update every weekend. Did that this morning. This afternoon, went to an appointment where I had to camp out, and decided to do some work. Booting up from hibernation… I got the blue screen of death on a Linux machine, of all things. (It was kind of beautiful…a little ASCII penguin with an ASCII exclamation point next to it. The QR code ruined the aesthetic, though.)
Somehow, my initramfs image didn’t generate when I updated. I didn’t realize it got removed. My best guess is that this has to do with the filesystem breakage (creating a bunch of empty files) a week or two ago - the mkinitcpio configuration file was empty. I don’t know WHY the ramdisk got removed only just now, but it did. I didn’t notice until my system went into hibernation then tried to boot up again.
Eventually, fixed it like so:
- Boot into live Artix USB.
- Unencrypt, mount partitions, connect to internet, yadda yadda.
- Remove the empty configuation file in
/etc/mkinitcpio.d/linux.preset artix-chrootinto the system and reinstall- Verify the new initramfs image is in
/boot. The rungrub-installandgrub-mkconfigfor good measure.
But then - again! - I rebooted, and ran into another issue. My graphical environment was so slow as to be non-functional.
Turns out it was a separate issue with Xlibre - had to uninstall the xlibre-video-intel package and everything started working just fine. (But this was after jumping to the conclusion that it had to do with more empty files, and trying to force reinstall a bunch of Xlibre packages, and dicking around trying to find any configuration files or object files that might be empty…). I was able to compare older Xorg log files to newer ones to identify any new errors, then search by that error to come across recent Artix forum posts where I found the recommendation to remove that package.
My lesson from today - which I should have learned many weeks past - is to read the output of pacman -Syu before I reboot.
EOF