Beginner questions (rpm-ostree and rebasing)

Aurora
1

I have a couple of beginner questions, that I hope it is okay that I post here. I’ve tried different distros before (Debian, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and NixOS), but I am still going by tutorial when I have to find stuff out.

So for my work, I need to use a certain writing program, that is only in .deb and .rpm and there is no flatpak available. At first I managed to install via rpm-ostree.

However when I tried to Rebase to the latest release (for fun), it threw up some errors, and I found a post positing that those errors could be due to using rpm-ostree which somehow makes rebasing an issue. Something with rpm-ostree messing with the immutable nature of Aurora, also making it unable to update itself as well.

So is that really true? Right now I am running said software through Distrobox with Boxbuddy in a Fedora instance, which to me seem a bit icky. Like I can get it to run completely “natively” in Aurora, and now it is running with a tiny Fedora icon and the program icon is all wrong. I can manage but I just like everything to be in order.

So in short, do I really need to run Resolve and the writing program (Fade In) in Distrobox to be able to get new updates to my system?

This is the rebase error I get, where it says that it is complete, but also that something went wrong:

mar 09 18:50:51 aurora ublue-rebase[5480]: + systemd-run --machine=lars@.host --user notify-send ‘System Rebase’ ‘Rebase completed. Please reboot to use the new image.’
mar 09 18:50:51 aurora systemd-run[5860]: Failed to start transient service unit: Connection reset by peer
mar 09 18:50:51 aurora systemd-run[5859]: Failed to start transient service unit: Transport endpoint is not connected
mar 09 18:50:51 aurora systemd[1]: ublue-rebase@aurora:stable.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
mar 09 18:50:51 aurora systemd[1]: ublue-rebase@aurora:stable.service: Failed with result ‘exit-code’.
mar 09 18:50:51 aurora systemd[1]: Failed to start ublue-rebase@aurora:stable.service - Rebase helper service used in Universal Blue KCM.
mar 09 18:50:51 aurora systemd[1]: ublue-rebase@aurora:stable.service: Consumed 634ms CPU time, 440M memory peak.

Thank you in advance.

2

Yep that is the case. If you layer something with rpm-ostree it can break rebasing. But that depends on the actual app/program that is layered. But its always a possibility that layering programs can break your updates / rebases to another image or when we update from Fedora 41 to 42. That is the reason we mainly don’t recommend it.

It seems you try to rebase with the Aurora preferences settings panel? As that error doesn’t actually have anything to do with the layering of the program. It’s something else. You can try using terminal and then just use ujust rebase-helper to rebase to later and see what happens.

Generally if there is no flatpak for an app you need, the other option is to use distrobox and install the app there and then you can export it to your host. You can also check if there is appimage for the app (but there propably isn’t if there isn’t a flatpak).

1 Like
3

Thank you for your reply. Yes I tried to use preferences settings panel, but with ujust it just works :wink:

Regarding distrobox is there anyway to remove the tiny blue fedora icon in the corner of the window?

4

One suggested strategy is to unlayer anything that is layered, rebase, then layer whatever was removed.

5

Thank you for your suggestion! That might be the way, as of now it is only two applications that I can via distrobox. :slight_smile: