How I broke my archlinux and fixed it
Today, new lesson learnt. I needed to test something with Internet Explorer and
Edge, so I’ve downloaded the test images from the Microsoft website, then
proceeded to install virtualbox, in my current KDE based ArchLinux desktop
(which I love a lot). A simple pacman -S virtualbox perhaps? Yes, except…
After installing virtualbox, it complained about some missing libssl2.0.0
lib… so I thought maybe I don’t have that installed? I didn’t really research
it, just installed openssl. Can’t hurt, right? even if it’s already installed.
And now sudo won’t work anymore. I knew I f’ed up but then I proceeded to
reboot. All this while going through a lot of chaos: organising some work,
talking to product managers, etc. I really didn’t need a machine down on its
knees.
Of course, it didn’t boot. After several unsuccessful tries, I managed to fix it. The problem was, as any ArchLinux user could tell you, that You should always run pacman -Syu before installing any package. There was a problem with running docker after a system upgrade (I think it may still be the case?) so I generally avoided doing the upgrade dance. When I’ve installed openssl, basically I’ve upgraded to a new major version and broke all software that linked to it. May have been bad timing, it looks like.
The solution is to boot from the Antergos live disk and run, as root:
pacman --root /mnt/arch -Syu
Which should work, in theory, except that my upgrade size was too big and didn’t fit in the live root of the Antergos. After upgrading all the affected libraries, I could then run a mount on proc, sys and dev, chroot to the mounted hardisk and run pacman -Syu just like normal.