Linux @lemmy.world linuxeasy @lemmy.world 4d ago

Arch Linux error /usr/lib/firmware/nvidia/ exists in filesystem

https://www.linuxeasy.org/arch-linux-e-il-problema-di-linux-firmware-nvidia-risulta-gia-nel-filesystem/

21 comments

News: Manual intervention required

Generally, always read the news before upgrading/updating.
- I use paru and it gave me a warning with a link to the news and even asked for additional confirmation before updating.
  
  I use yay, where you have to explicitly query the news (yay -Pw), so I just alias yay="yay -Pw; yay"'d
always read the news before updates. There was one that said manual intervention was needed, and gave you the exact command you needed to run
- I only read it when I get error like this to know what I shouldn't do. Is that acceptable? Always checking the news seems superfluous because most times it goes smoothly, and packman will fail and let you know if it can't do something.
  
  I use this approach and there's never been an unrecoverable situation over the decade plus I've used Arch Linux.
  
  I've learnt to check the endeavouros forum before a kernel update (normal updates are fine), it can save you from having to chroot and tweak stuff... It takes 5 minutes to check against 2 hours to fix
  
  You can just subscribe to the announcement mailing list: https://lists.archlinux.org/mailman3/lists/arch-announce.lists.archlinux.org/
  
  This way you get notified immediately and there are also very few messages being sent on the list.
https://archlinux.org/news/linux-firmware-2025061312fe085f-5-upgrade-requires-manual-intervention/
The package archnews2 also provides an arch news reader. This issue was also announced in Arch forums before it was rolled out - I saw it in Lemmy.

But, yeah, you really do have to read archnews release notes. Frankly, it annoys me a bit - pacman should have the concept of breaking changes and show related news before upgrades. I think one of the news packages (maybe archnews2?) has a config setting that always displays news before upgrades, but it's only annoying because it is ignorant of whether the news item affects any given system, so it's often just noise; I think I turned it off because it kept showing me the same news every time.

It's the worst part of Arch, and it's poorly handled. I don't know of a rolling release that handles informing the user of, breaking changes better, though.
- I’ve set everything up where I get news when there’s one. There’s like one news post every two months or so. I can deal with that “noise”.
  
  How did you do ðis? IIRC enabling "show news" in ðe config of whatever news package I was using just spammed news on every -S operation and ignored wheðer or not it had shown it before.
  
  Did you write a custom script? How are you checking of ðere's new news and displaying it?
Uninstall the existing versions of whatever you have installed, then install the new version again.
The good thing is it fails properly. This should not continue because it would break your system. The package ownership of those files has changed but the package manager would have to remove the current owning package then install the new owning package after in two separate transactions. Technically this could be make possible I think it would lead to bad packaging and would be bad practice. Happily it fails loudly and makes next steps fairly clear.
This is what got me to switch several systems to tumbleweed. Yes I can read update notifications. No I don't want to constantly.

Just recently mkv playback started crashing under arch too. Another breaking update.
I thought it was a residue of something that i tried to install and just removed it using,

sudo rm -rf /usr/lib/firmware/nvidia/ad103 /usr/lib/firmware/nvidia/ad104 /usr/lib/firmware/nvidia/ad106 /usr/lib/firmware/nvidia/ad107

But then it the update worked fine. I thought, my system don't have NVIDIA, so it might not be necessary.

21 comments