TL;DR: Had to run rpm-ostree upgrade from a pinned previous system due to error
error: Writing rpmdb: Failed to update rpmdb (rpmtsRun code -1)
I know so little that I initially asked this question on the universal blue forums. XD
I’ve never used Linux as a desktop for work before, so I was starting to get a little uptight when I wasn’t getting any new updates staged for a couple weeks. Had some slack time Friday so I decided to get into it.
I’m fuzzy on a few details so please bear with me.
This system started out in November as Bazzite (since that’s what I’d been trying at home) but I rebased to Kinoite about a month prior to the Fedora 42 release. Rebase went fine, no issues after.
Two weeks ago, the command
$ rpm-ostree status
looked fine and gave the correct results except for an error at the top. I can’t remember what this said exactly, but from my history it seems it had to do with rpm-ostreed-automatic.service, since I looked at both the then-current status of that service as well as the journal entries for rpm-ostreed.service.
Anyway, in my (admittedly limited) experience atomic desktop generally does the right thing so I left it alone. Shut down at the end of the week and when I brought the system back up last Monday, the error was gone. Still didn’t have a new system staged, though.
Flash forward to last Friday when I checked github and I see that there have been multiple updates almost every day for kinoite-nvidia, so I felt I had to try something to get unstuck. I forced the issue with
$ sudo rpm-ostree upgrade
which led to the error about rpmdb at the top of this post. No other errors in the output.
Googled a bit and tried running
$ sudo rpm-ostree cleanup -m
$ sudo rpm-ostree refresh-md
Ran the upgrade again, got the same error.
Finally, for a goof I rebooted into system 1, where I was able to upgrade just fine.
Thankfully, everything I need for work was working in the new system 0, so I pinned that. The old system 0…disappeared? Idk.
Am I fixed? Is there anything else I should check? Here’s my current rpm-ostree status output:
State: idle
AutomaticUpdates: stage; rpm-ostreed-automatic.timer: no runs since boot
Deployments:
● ostree-image-signed:docker://ghcr.io/ublue-os/kinoite-nvidia:latest
Digest: sha256:c2e81058318f34f0bf82a9537a978869144f8672870e2001ecc6987e2a54892b
Version: 42.20250509.2 (2025-05-09T12:53:26Z)
LayeredPackages: containerd.io docker-buildx-plugin docker-ce docker-ce-cli docker-compose-plugin guestfs-tools libvirt-daemon-config-network
libvirt-daemon-kvm libvirt-nss python3-libguestfs qemu-kvm virt-install virt-manager virt-top virt-viewer
LocalPackages: veracrypt-1.26.20-1.x86_64 virtio-win-0.1.266-1.noarch
Pinned: yes
ostree-image-signed:docker://ghcr.io/ublue-os/kinoite-nvidia:latest
Digest: sha256:dfe59750925ca6c5be73d74a51bed15b6e15e07e1edb1b33032fb9ebc4e97b9f
Version: 42.20250424.0 (2025-04-25T04:15:05Z)
LayeredPackages: containerd.io docker-buildx-plugin docker-ce docker-ce-cli docker-compose-plugin guestfs-tools libvirt-daemon-config-network
libvirt-daemon-kvm libvirt-nss python3-libguestfs qemu-kvm virt-install virt-manager virt-top virt-viewer
LocalPackages: veracrypt-1.26.20-1.x86_64 virtio-win-0.1.266-1.noarch
Pinned: yes
ostree-image-signed:docker://ghcr.io/ublue-os/kinoite-nvidia:latest
Digest: sha256:f304f7ec8614537b5b1ef6121cdad6c2c720a9c33738ddd2c2d30a2d58a71b78
Version: 41.20250403.0 (2025-04-04T04:10:40Z)
LayeredPackages: containerd.io docker-buildx-plugin docker-ce docker-ce-cli docker-compose-plugin guestfs-tools libvirt-daemon-config-network
libvirt-daemon-kvm libvirt-nss python3-libguestfs qemu-kvm virt-install virt-manager virt-top virt-viewer
LocalPackages: veracrypt-1.26.20-1.x86_64 virtio-win-0.1.266-1.noarch
Pinned: yes
Thanks all.