KopiaUI 0.10.7 fails to open in RedHat 8.5

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Hi! Thanks to the devs for what looks to be a great tool! It is new to me. I elected to try it over Restic and Borg for some local development needs and before my organization has deployed Veeam to our area.

On Pop!_OS (Ubuntu) 20.04, GNOME 3.36.8 the KopiaUI appears to be working for me (other than the missing /opt/KopiaUI/resources/app-update.yml updater bug/failure that others have noted). The KopiaUI menu is added to the top menu and the menu items open the corresponding UIs.

However, on RHEL 8.5, GNOME 3.32.2, it fails to add the KopiaUI menu to the meny bar and no UIs can be opened. Several kopia-ui processes appear to be running but no UI is displayed after starting KopiaUI from the GNOME launcher or via CLI with $ kopia-ui.

$ kopia-ui
MESA-LOADER: failed to retrieve device information
MESA-LOADER: failed to retrieve device information
MESA-LOADER: failed to retrieve device information
[45383:0422/174601.406181:ERROR:gbm_wrapper.cc(275)] Failed to export buffer to dma_buf: No such file or directory (2)

Note: both cases are running on VMs in VMWare Fusion on a MacOS host and have no GPU.

I can deal with using the kopia CLI for my needs on RHEL 8 - but based on playing around with the UI on Ubuntu it would be rather nice to have the KopiaUI working on RHEL! I realize that the KopiaUI is a work in progress but it’s looking pretty dang good already. Given the rich capabilities of the policy architecture it’s good to have UI access to the configurations.

I have not found any issues about this particular KopiaUI bug in the kopia github or this discourse yet.

cheers!

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Update: I played with gnome tweaks to see if a configuration in gnome is blocking the KopiaUI from opening in RHEL 8 desktop but that had no effect. This still is a “bug”.

After finally finding this comment: After upgrade to 0.8.0-beta1, unable to access S3 repo via Kopia server · Issue #880 · kopia/kopia · GitHub I learned how to start kopia server and be able to actually log in the web UI. (My first hint was looking at the KopiaUI logs and seeing the command it was using to start the server…)

Woot, I now have the web UI to view snapshots, configure policies, etc, on RHEL 8 should I want to! I have figured out how to do it all via CLI and using cron to initiate snapshots, which is what I’ll use on my ‘production’ platform, with backup connection, policies and cron config setup with Ansible.

I would be very helpful if the documentation for the server start (server start | Kopia) included the examples given by @jkowalski in that issue thread post.

Overall, Kopia is a slick and efficient backup tool once you grok how to run it - thanks!