Boot Menu and Recovery

Rescue Mode

Sometimes reinstalling your packages at boot fails every time, for example after a soft reset, a move to a new release or a desktop switch. Then the boot never gets past "Installing user applications…" and you can't reach the desktop.

The boot menu's RakuOS rescue (text console, user packages off) submenu is for exactly this. It has one entry per installed image. A rescue entry starts that image:

  • without your installed packages (the overlay isn't used),
  • without reinstalling or syncing anything at boot,
  • to a text login, without the desktop or boot splash.

Nothing in your files or package list is changed.

Using it

  1. At the boot menu, open RakuOS rescue (text console, user packages off) and choose the first entry (the newest image).
  2. Log in with your normal user name and password.
  3. Find out why the reinstall failed:
journalctl -b -1 -u rakuos-overlay-sync --no-pager | tail -n 50

Usually it's a missing network connection, or a package in your list that no repository offers any more (often after turning off RPM Fusion or Terra, or after a release change).

  1. Back up your package list:
cp /var/lib/rakuos/packages.list ~/packages.list.bak
  1. Reset, then reboot normally:
sudo rakuos reset-overlay --confirm    # full reset: back to the image's own packages
sudo systemctl reboot

If the cause is gone (for example the network works now), sudo rakuos reset-overlay --soft keeps your list and tries the reinstall again instead. See Resetting your apps.

  1. After the full reset, reinstall what you need from ~/packages.list.bak with sudo rum install, leaving out the package that failed.

Don't install or remove packages with rum while in rescue mode: your installed packages aren't active there.

Without the rescue submenu

Older images don't have it. You can do the same by hand: at the boot menu, highlight the normal top entry and press e. Go to the end of the line that starts with linux, add

rakuos.rescue rd.systemd.mask=rakuos-overlay-mount.service systemd.mask=rakuos-overlay-sync.service systemd.unit=multi-user.target

and press Ctrl+X (or F10) to boot. This applies to this boot only.