Hi, I’ve running Bazzite on my gaming PC and it’s great, but I lost all the pre-installed .rpm packages that were layered by default. Is there a way to restore those?
Here’s what happened:
I left my gaming PC idle for more than a month (from May 29 to July 4th)
For some reasons updates didn’t work.
When trying to resolve the issue, I ran a command that removed all the layered packages.
After removing the layered packages, the update worked and everything went mostly back to normal.
However, all the pre-installed packages are missing. Previously, I’d see some layered packages when I ran:
rpm-ostree status
Is there a way to restore those without needing to do a fresh install of the OS?
There are no layered packages by default, you most likely ran some ujust commands which layered packages like coolercontrol. Your rpm-ostree status shows that your current and rollback deployment no longer has the layered packages, and you don’t have a pinned deployment from when you had them layered. So your only choice is to re-run the ujust commands.
One thing you can try is type ujust on your terminal and repeatedly press Up on your keyboard to see if you can fetch some of the commands you ran previously. Or run journalctl --since="n days ago" | grep ostree, in which n is the num. of days since you ran rpm-ostree reset (e.g. if you ran the reset command the day before yesterday, it would be “2 days ago”), and see if it picks up anything.
Thanks for your help! Your post helped me out. I used that clever journalctl command you mentioned to dig deeper. I discovered that rpm-ostree logged what it was layering and I think I found the missing packages!
I was able to capture the list of packages from the journalctl output and I included it below. Note: the list includes all the dependencies that are “automatically” installed. So it’s a long list and it’s not obvious to me which packages are “user-specified” vs automatic. Like I think some packages in the list were directly specified with an rpm-ostree installed command. But I think most of the packages in that list were automatically installed.
Anyways, I was looking carefully at the list and I think I can restore (everything?) by running:
But I’m not 100% sure. I will give this a shot. Hopefully it captures everything I’m missing.
By the way, if I really did use ujust to install the layered packages, then I don’t remember it. In fact, I remember being surprised when I saw the layered packages for the first time. Was there ever a time when Bazzite would automatically install certain things if it detected specific hardware or something?
And finally, here’s that list of packages I mentioned. I recovered this from journalctl. And it seems to include the “manually” installed packages and the “automatically” installed packages:
