Flatpak: all apps suddenly broken: Can't mkdir [...] Read-only file system

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1

On F37, with 3 installed flatpak applications (one of which in multiple versions) all of a sudden all three apps fails with messages like bwrap: Can’t mkdir /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/GL: Read-only file system. The actual file system it fails on varies between apps.

All are installed using --user. Tried to remove one of them (telegram) and reinstall without --user. Same result.

Any clues out there?

2

It’s a pretty old link, so I don’t even know if this behavior would be caused by the same underlying issue anymore, but any chance that you have a symlink in your root directory that points to the root directory itself?

https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/1357#issuecomment-438861140

And potentially related - do you know if you used sudo to originally install those apps?

3

Hi, thanks for taking some time to answer

but any chance that you have a symlink in your root directory that points to the root directory itself?

$ find / -maxdepth 1 -type l 
/lib
/lib64
/build-
/sbin
/bin
/build-flatpak

Looks sound to me. If I had done such a weird thing I would probably have remembered it.

do you know if you used sudo to originally install those apps?

Obviously no, since I was using --user. Looking at the installation directories under for example ~/.var/app/org.telegram.desktop looks sound i. e., I own them and have write permissions.

OTOH, the test I did was to uninstall my --user telegram and reinstall without --user, then of course using sudo. However, no difference, same results

EDIT: Actually, I had two broken links in /. After removing them, still same results. New status report:

$ find /  -maxdepth 1  -type l
/lib
/lib64
/sbin
/bin
4

Evidence points to me, having at one point run flatpak-builder as root. Question becomes how to resurrect my flatpak after this mistake

5

Sorry, I don’t know much overall about the topic, but just thinking out loud - with a relatively lower number of flatpak apps installed, would it be feasible to uninstall the three existing ones, then reinstall flatpak and its associated packages themselves?

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6

I should of course have done that myself. Thanks for input, problem solved

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