Upgrading to 21.10 causes inaccessible instance, "No schemas installed"

[Evan Reed]

After successfully running do-release-upgrade to 21.10, I exited in order to wsl --shutdown

When trying to start/enter ubuntu-commprev wsl distro the wsl command immediately exits with a "No schemas installed" message before entering bash. Running wsl -l -v shows the distro started and is running fine but I can't enter the linux shell environment at all for some reason.

Anyone have a clue what schemas this message is referring to?

[Kexy Biscuit (kexybiscuit)]

Seems that the message is from the login shell.

❯ wsl -d Ubuntu-CommPrev bash
kexybiscuit@PB360M-D:/mnt/c/Users/KexyBiscuit$ exit
exit

❯ wsl -d Ubuntu-CommPrev bash -l
No schemas installed

[Kexy Biscuit (kexybiscuit)]

This command resolves the problem.

wsl -d Ubuntu-CommPrev -- sudo apt install gsettings-desktop-schemas

[NotTheDr01ds (notthedr01ds)]

This looks to be due to a change/bug in /etc/profile.d/wsl-integration.sh, provided by the ubuntu-wsl-integration package, which is upgraded from 0.30.0 to 0.31.3 as part of the Impish upgrade.

diff'ing the before and after upgrade (using two different WSL instances) shows that the new version attempts to match the gtk-theme (with the new Impish Yara themes) to the Windows theme (e.g. "dark") using gsettings.

But without the gsettings-desktop-schemas this fails.

Given that the offending issue is in a system-wide profile script, it completely breaks the instance until resolved. This is a pretty serious issue, IMHO. The typical user will not know how to recover at this point.

And yes, launching with something like "wsl -d Ubuntu-CommPrev bash" gets around the issue by starting a non-login shell (and thus not running the profile scripts).

IMHO, either gsettings-desktop-schemas should be added as a dependency of ubuntu-wsl-integration, or the error handling in wsl-integration.sh should fail more gracefully, or both.