Issue uninstalling Toltec

[murchu27]

Hey gang! Thanks for your continued work on this great project!

I used to use Toltec and 3rd party apps a lot, but at some point I stripped them away to let a friend use the tablet.
Now, I see that I have let my tablet update a few too many times, and my version (3.8.2) is currently not supported by Toltec.
No harm there, I know that you folks will get Toltec updated before too long!

In the meantime though, I wanted to check my tablet to make sure that I cleaned out Toltec properly, as I used to do some right hack jobs on these kinds of projects. Sure enough, it seems there's still traces of Toltec on my system.

When I try to run toltecctl uninstall, I get toltecctl: command not found. Seems good so far.
But then, when I check directories in /home/root/, I see an .entware directory. Uh oh!
I also still have the opt.mount service running on the tablet, visible with systemctl status opt.mount --no-pager.
If I try to stop this service, it fails with the following logs:

Jun 07 12:39:17 reMarkable systemd[1]: Unmounting Bind mount /home/root/.entware over /opt...
Jun 07 12:39:17 reMarkable umount[553]: umount: /opt: target is busy.
Jun 07 12:39:17 reMarkable systemd[1]: opt.mount: Mount process exited, code=exited, status=32/n/a
Jun 07 12:39:17 reMarkable systemd[1]: Failed unmounting Bind mount /home/root/.entware over /opt.

On a normal Linux box, I might run lsof to see what's using /opt, but the reMarkable shell doesn't seem to have lsof...

Can someone help me get Toltec fully removed from my tablet, so that it is nice and clean for when Toltec supports it?

[jkesselm]

There is a tool -- I'm away from my machine and don't remember the name offhand -- that will let you switch to any of a fairly wide range of versions of the reMarkable base software. I had to use that to roll back to a version Toltec supported. So I'd suggest trying that, then doing a Toltec reinstall.

[murchu27]

Ah yes, I think that's ddvk/remarkable-update: https://github.com/ddvk/remarkable-update

I could try that... My only hesitation is that, even if I'm on a supported reMarkable version and could install Toltec, I will probably get an error about Toltec being installed already, because of the existence of the .entware directory and opt.mount service. So either way, I think I will still need to manually uninstall Toltec somehow.

[Eeems]

https://remarkable.guide/faqs.html#can-i-downgrade-to-a-different-os-version
has a link to the latest recommended tool. After doing a downgrade/upgrade, you just need to delete /home/root/.entware to remove toltec, as no changes to the root partition are there anymore (https://remarkable.guide/faqs.html#what-happens-to-third-party-software-when-i-update-or-downgrade-my-os) which is the reason you need to reenable after an upgrade.

[Eeems]

Are you sure you have toltec installed and not remarkable_entware?

If they did somehow install toltec on 3.8, which is not supported, you will encounter issues if you tried to update to the latest version that will probably leave you in a soft-bricked state.

You can install lsof with opkg install lsof, and then see what is running that is using /opt. At which time you'll want to stop/disable the services. That said, I would recommend just downgrading/upgrading twice, and then removing the /home/root/.entware folder.
https://remarkable.guide/faqs.html#can-i-downgrade-to-a-different-os-version
https://remarkable.guide/faqs.html#what-happens-to-third-party-software-when-i-update-or-downgrade-my-os

[murchu27]

What's the purpose of downgrading/upgrading, if I am just removing /home/root/.entware? Can't I just do that without downgrading/upgrading? Just trying to fully understand the steps before I do anything destructive.

[Eeems]

Downgrading/upgrading replaces the root partition with a known state, as you don't know what modifications have been made to it. This way you avoid soft-bricking that would be caused by changes to the root partition that no longer work if the underlying files are now missing.

This is the same reason you don't do a "factory reset" with third party software installed, and the instructions for doing a true factory reset involve downgrading/upgrading twice before using the built-in factory reset. While they do instruct you to uninstall third party software first (like toltec), you can also skip that step and just do two system upgrades/downgrades in a pinch.
https://remarkable.guide/faqs.html#is-it-safe-to-factory-reset-my-device
https://remarkable.guide/tech/factory-reset.html

[murchu27]

Okay got it, thanks for the explanation! I'll try out codexctl, and post the results here.

[murchu27]

Alright, played around with this and took a lot of notes.

Before starting, my tablet had 3.8 and 3.11 installed, with 3.8 being the active installation, and 3.11 on the fallback partition.
I downloaded the most recent pre-compiled binary of codexctl and SFTP'd to my tablet.
After marking codexctl.bin as executable (chmod +x codexctl.bin), I simply ran ./codexctl.bin install 3.3.2.1666 to install version 3.3.2.1666.
The tablet rebooted without issue into v3.3, and I immediately switched off auto-updates.

I was then keen to get rid of 3.11, as I've seen lots of 3rd party stuff (notably rmfakecloud) has trouble with it.
But as noted in a few places on the codexctl repo, the same install commands don't work when running on v3.11.
So, instead, I downloaded v3.8 to my computer, extracted the image, and transferred to my tablet.

./codexctl.bin download 3.8.2.1965
./codexctl.bin extract ~/Downloads/3.8.2.1965_reMarkable2-D1pFxylu6p.signed
mv extracted reMarkable2-3.8.2.1965.img
# SFTP to tablet...

Then, back on the tablet, after checking which partition was my fallback partition, I overwrote that partition with the extracted v3.8 image: dd if=reMarkable2-3.8.2.1965.img of=/dev/mmcblk2p2

After doing this, I switched to the newly written v3.8 partition using ./codexctl.bin restore, to make sure it was working. When I did this, my tablet seemed to lock up (display was frozen, couldn't SSH). But as soon as I plugged in a USB cable, it rebooted automatically, and booted without issue into the v3.8 partition.

I once again turned off auto-updates as soon as I booted in.

From what I can tell, this should constitute "two system upgrades/downgrades", as both partitions were overwritten with a fresh installation. So then I removed .entware. And checking systemctl status opt.mount shows that opt.mount is now gone! So looks like a full uninstall!

@Eeems greatly appreciate your help with this :)