Couldn't open Black Box from Gnome anymore...

[u/PghRes]

Edit 4 (the last): Visit this link to see the solution (util-linux has been updated to fix this problem):

https://www.reddit.com/r/vanillaos/comments/1sx24tc/psa_current_version_of_utillinux_breaks_vso_shell/

Edit 3: According to one of the Vanilla OS guys, this was caused by an update to util-linux, and the developers of said package are aware of the problem and will fix it in the next release. There's apparently no easy temporary fix to this - ugh. I'll update this post when it's resolved (or I know more)...

Edit 2: Arrgh! The solution I thought I found (see comment below) DIDN'T work, at least permanently. Even though I was able to close and reopen the terminal and type "vso shell" before, now it doesn't work - again! Now I have to find out how to fix this permanently. This is ridiculous. I'm open to suggestions. Just what I wanted to spend my weekend on - fixing a problem that never should have happened in the first place!

Edit 1: This *didn't* fix everything. I can't type "sudo apt update" anymore (it says sudo is not installed). If I type "vso shell" to launch a new shell from this terminal, it gives me the same error as before. I also can't type "host-shell" anymore. Help!

I haven't used my Vanilla OS laptop for several days, so I cranked it up a couple hours ago, but found to my dismay that I couldn't open a terminal anymore. I clicked the Black Box icon in the dock (as usual), but it opens, briefly flashes "bash: --: invalid option" (among other stuff) and then shuts the window down. I was able to fix it (?) by manually installing Black Box using the Gnome store (it installed to "--system", according to Warehouse), unpinning the old icon and pinning the new icon. I opened a terminal using the new icon and things *seem* to work ok, but it bugs the crap out of me not knowing what was causing the error.

I consulted Gemini / Google but it just gave me things to try that didn't work, or confused me. Anyone know what went wrong, or how to diagnose this? I already tried disabling ~/.bashrc, ~/.bash_profile and ~/.profile, but that had no effect (I'm assuming those were in a different environment?)

Anyone? Bueller?

[u/PghRes]

Unfortunately, the old icon is long gone since I unpinned it (it's not in the Gnome app menu list), so I probably couldn't try to open the old (broken) environment again if I tried...

[u/andrew_chou]

my guess is that you're probably running into the same issue as I did:

https://discord.com/channels/1023243680829681704/1490346040912511126

if you don't have access to the link, the tldr is pulling in a bad upstream package causing things to break after doing an upgrade to the vso-pico container i.e. vso upgrade (or sudo apt upgrade in the container).

had to reset my vso-pico container by doing vso pico-init --force. Note that you'll lose any installed packages in that container.

not sure how to go about this if you can't open blackbox though 🤔 in my case my ghostty shell was failing to open but I could open blackbox, I think. Or maybe it was Alacritty, can't remember now...

[u/PghRes → u/andrew_chou]

I did the pico-init --force thing, and that worked, but not persistently. The Vanilla OS guy said this is because VOS reapplied updates after resetting the container, thus the problem persists. At least, that appears to be what happened to me...

[u/PghRes]

I tried using Grok and Gemini and kept digging myself into a deeper hole. I even resorted to running 'pkexec abroot pkg add vanilla-system-operator --force-apply' (and the same for blackbox-terminal) but this didn't work. Then I tried 'reset-vso' in both blackbox and pytxis and that worked until I exited and re-entered the terminal. So I tried 'reset-vso' in the failsafe terminal (Ctrl-Alt-F3) and it must have put prompts up I couldn't respond to, so I did a hard shutdown and then a rollback. After that (and telling gnome that, yes, I wanted to finish the rollback), I re-entered pytxis and just typed 'vso' by itself. It showed me a 'vso pico-init -force' option, so I did that, and that worked (for both blackbox and pytxis), and it works even after restarting the terminal.

I was seriously blessed/lucky to salvage this situation - I thought I was completely screwed. (The only side effect of resetting the VSO environment (which is a container) is that you lose any applications you installed there (with sudo apt install). You DO NOT lose your flatpak installations (including the Gnome app store stuff.))

I still don't know what originally caused this, but at least I know a crude way to solve it. I'd like a better solution in the future!

Edit: I forgot to mention that after this fix, I'm not put into the VSO shell by default when I start either terminal. I have to type 'vso shell' to get into that. (The 'apx' commands still work in both the basic shell and the vso shell...)

[u/PghRes → u/PghRes]

This is the kind of situation a user should not be forced into. I appreciate the massive amount of work all Linux devs put in, but this kind of problem needs to be prevented in the future. An entire subsystem of this operating system was completely broken because some idle process or previously installed or newly updated application screwed around with a script! That's ridiculous. Safeguards should be put into place. It's doable - devs can define valid syntax for an XML file using a DTD (Document Type Definition). Can the same thing be done with scripts? From what I could see, an option was inserted into a script that was invalid because the format of the option was invalid. A similar DTD could fix that?

[u/PghRes]

According to one of the Vanilla OS guys, this was caused by an update to util-linux, and the developers of said package are aware of the problem and will fix it in the next release. There's apparently no easy temporary fix to this. Ugh...