Snapper Rollback in boot menu

[colorizer]

Hi,

Is there a way to enable snapper Rollback in boot menu? I don't currently seem to have it.

[geckolinux]

Hi there, unfortunately no, only systems installed with the YaST installer allow for that, and since YaST doesn't work for live system installation GeckoLinux has to use Calamares.

[hZorah]

Hi there. So, if I break my system in a way that I can't boot from it, how can I rollback to a snapshot?

[hZorah]

I think here it shows how: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/snapper
Apparently I should boot from a Live Session.
It is on Arch wiki but should work. Requires further testing.

[geckolinux]

Hi there, yes, it currently requires a fairly involved manual process to rollback because the Btrfs subvolume layout and the resulting /etc/fstab file aren't ideal.

I'm currently testing https://github.com/Antynea/grub-btrfs together with a new Calamares installer patch that allows for a better Btrfs subvolume scheme, and initial results are looking very promising.

[hZorah]

If you could pull that out, it would be amazing!!
I would even buy you a coffee :D

[geckolinux]

Appreciate it! I'll try to release a beta soon, testing on other configurations to make sure it's reliable would be very much appreciated.

[geckolinux]

@hZorah , @colorizer If you'd like to test it here's an ISO with Btrfs snapshots and GRUB integration, thanks to some major improvements in Calamares and a bit of hacking:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/geckolinux/files/testing/GeckoLinux_ROLLING_XFCE.x86_64-999.211212.0.iso/download
I'd appreciate tests on real hardware and VMs, with and/or without other installed operating systems, on legacy BIOS or EFI systems, and also with the other non-Btrfs filesystems to make sure the installed system is bootable. Thanks in advance!

[colorizer]

Thank you! I had tried to run it through VM. I am getting the following message when I try to run sudo snapper rollback from a readonly snapshot. How should I proceed here?

Cannot detect ambit since default subvolume is unknown.
This can happen if the system was not set up for rollback.
The ambit can be specified manually using the --ambit option.

Please note that I had run this VM with 8gb hard disk allocated. Could that be a reason?

[geckolinux]

Hi there, thanks a lot for testing! There are two easy workarounds:

1. snapper --ambit classic rollback
   or
2. Manually run the YaST Bootloader tool to generate /etc/default/grub_installdevice (inside a normal RW instance of the system obviously).