TL;DR: Had to run rpm-ostree upgrade from a pinned previous system due to error
error: Writing rpmdb: Failed to update rpmdb (rpmtsRun code -1)
Hope I’m posting this in the right place. I didn’t see a category for Kinoite.
I’ve never used Linux as a desktop for work before, so I was starting to get a little uptight when I wasn’t getting any new updates staged for a couple weeks. Had some slack time today so I decided to get into it.
I’m fuzzy on a few details so please bear with me.
This system started out in November as Bazzite (since that’s what I’d been trying at home) but I rebased to Kinoite about a month prior to the Fedora 42 release. Rebase went fine, no issues after.
Last week, the command
$ rpm-ostree status
looked fine and gave the correct results except for an error at the top. I can’t remember what this said exactly, but from my history it seems it had to do with rpm-ostreed-automatic.service, since I looked at both the then-current status of that service as well as the journal entries for rpm-ostreed.service.
Anyway, in my (admittedly limited) experience universal blue generally does the right thing so I left it alone. Shut down on Friday and when I brought the system back up Monday this week, the error was gone. Still didn’t have a new system staged, though.
Flash forward to today when I checked github and I see that there have been multiple updates almost every day for kinoite-nvidia, so I felt I had to try something to get unstuck. I forced the issue with
$ sudo rpm-ostree upgrade
which led to the error about rpmdb at the top of this post. No other errors in the output.
Googled a bit and tried running
$ sudo rpm-ostree cleanup -m
$ sudo rpm-ostree refresh-md
Ran the upgrade again, got the same error.
Finally, for a goof I rebooted into system 1, where I was able to upgrade just fine.
Thankfully, everything I need for work was working in the new system 0, so I pinned that. The old system 0…disappeared? Idk.
Am I fixed? Is there anything else I should check? I tried to include my current rpm-ostree status output in this post, but the forum gods apparently thought I was putting too many web links.
Thanks all.