gnome shell installed in Cloudron 6

[zjuhasz1]

@girish It looks like a full gnome desktop is not installed. There is gnome shell and a few other gnome components, obviously enough to launch a basic window manager because that is what it is doing.

I've been continuously working on this for the last 3 days so let me give some updates. It turns out Cloudron did manage to do a backup after the update to 6.0.1 before my server died so that is what I restored. I was very happy about this because I believe the underlying problem that initially brought my server down had to do with the power management in certain 4.x kernel versions causing data corruption in certain Samsung SSDs. There are supposedly workarounds for this but it was fixed so I'd rather use a newer kernel if possible. So since version 6+ works on Ubuntu 20.04.x that is what I installed and did the recovery on. My understanding is only the Cloudron versions need to match for a recovery and not the Ubuntu version but perhaps I am wrong about this. Either way the issues with gnome occur before I even start the recovery process.

I have done several reinstalls with a base Ubuntu Server 20.04.1 image. I tell the installer to install openssh and nothing else. After the install I setup ssh, I do some modifications to ssh options and copy my key pair. After all these steps gnome is not installed. If I reboot the server it boots into shell. Then I install Cloudron using commands:

wget https://cloudron.io/cloudron-setup
chmod +x ./cloudron-setup
./cloudron-setup --version 6.0.1

The installer finishes normally. After reboot gnome is installed and I boot into GUI login screen which I can log into and takes me to some sort of gnome desktop (although I don't think it is complete gnome desktop, I don't know that much about gnome). After this the system has some weird behavior where it goes into some sort of unrecoverable hibernation after about 5 - 10 minutes. I tried various methods to disable sleep and none of them resolved the problem. Finally I modified grub so it forcibly boots into cli shell instead of gnome. After that, everything is working like normal so far. The Cloudron restore has been succesful and while I haven't tested much yet, it all seems to be working so far.

To clean things up my next step will be to remove packages that shouldn't be there for Cloudron. Here is the full list of packages installed by apt . If you have some quick way to match this to what it should be I would appreciate you letting me know which packages shouldn't be installed. This server is dedicated solely to Cloudron so if Cloudron wasn't supposed to install it, it shouldn't be there.

I haven't tried installing on any other devices virtual or otherwise with 6.0.1 but if someone wants to try to replicate this bug it would be a very quick test. I could give the full specs of the system I am running Cloudron on but it probably is too much work to try to replicate that. My opinion on what relevant factors may be are:

1. Physical bare metal server
2. Has display and keyboard connected
3. Has dedicated GPU
4. Uses dedicated account for Cloudron (but this is the only account and the server does nothing else, I just didn't want to use root)

So perhaps someone could try to replicate with latest Ubuntu 20.0.4 Server installer and Cloudron 6.0.1. Either way I would appreciate knowing which of my packages should be removed.

[subven]

@zjuhasz1 are you using a fresh installation of Ubuntu 18.04 Server from an image like ubuntu-18.04.5-live-server-amd64.iso? If so, please mark only "Basic Ubuntu Server" + "OpenSSH-Server" at the software selection installation wizzard.

So you did something like this to "disable it":

systemctl mask sleep.target suspend.target hibernate.target hybrid-sleep.target

?

Please be aware that you should not manually install packages on your Cloudron server nor doing stuff like apt upgrade. AFAIK having a desktop environment is also not supported at all (please correct me if I'm mistaken here). Maybe Gnome autoupdates crashed your Cloudron installation and maybe this is the root source of the troubles you had before?

Please mark this topic as resolved if your questions are answered

[zjuhasz1]

@subven It is just a base Ubuntu server install, I did not manually install any packages. Gnome was not installed when I ran the Cloudron installer. After installing Cloudron Gnome was installed. It appears as if the Cloudron installer installed Gnome.

[girish]

@zjuhasz1 Cloudron doesn't install gnome but I guess you can just uninstall it. I think apt remove ubuntu-gnome-desktop .

[subven]

@zjuhasz1 take a look at https://forum.cloudron.io/post/22665

[girish]

Thanks to @jan_z for the solution.

So:

    ~# aptitude why xserver-xorg
    i   collectd    Recommends libnotify4 (>= 0.7.0)
    i A libnotify4  Recommends gnome-shell | notification-daemon
    i A gnome-shell Recommends gdm3 (>= 3.10.0.1-3~)
    i A gdm3        Recommends xserver-xorg

On existing installs, you can simply run apt remove -y gnome-shell && apt -y autoremove to remove all the xorg and gnome shell stuff. You also have to reboot the server so that services like Xorg are stopped (alternately, you have to stop those manually).

I have fixed this in Cloudron 6.1 with https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/box/-/commit/cf79e7f1ec9787aa773f82792177eb8ccbd68f60 (should be out soon) . Will update the DO marketplace image once 6.1 is out.

[zjuhasz1]

@girish Thanks but that doesn't quite remove all the gnome stuff that the Cloudron installer installed. The following and their dependencies are still installed, might be more also.

gnome-control-center-data/focal-updates,now 1:3.36.4-0ubuntu2 all [installed,automatic]
gnome-control-center-faces/focal-updates,now 1:3.36.4-0ubuntu2 all [installed,automatic]
gnome-control-center/focal-updates,now 1:3.36.4-0ubuntu2 amd64 [installed,automatic]
gnome-desktop3-data/focal-updates,now 3.36.8-0ubuntu1 all [installed,automatic]
gnome-keyring-pkcs11/focal,now 3.36.0-1ubuntu1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
gnome-keyring/focal,now 3.36.0-1ubuntu1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
gnome-online-accounts/focal,now 3.36.0-1ubuntu1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
gnome-settings-daemon-common/focal-updates,now 3.36.1-0ubuntu1 all [installed,automatic]
gnome-settings-daemon/focal-updates,now 3.36.1-0ubuntu1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
gnome-user-docs/focal-updates,now 3.36.2+git20200704-0ubuntu0.1 all [installed,automatic]

[girish]

@zjuhasz1 Right, this is also fixed. The packages were installed because we use apt without --no-install-recommends. You can remove those gnome packages by hand for now if it bothers you but it doesn't run any daemons, so it's mostly harmless.