Sam Varshavchik wrote:
You can try installing FC4 on another machine, and copy the librpm .so
file from there. You will not be able to do anything, NOTHING, not
rpm, not yum, until this is fixed.
But, that's just the beginning. What you basically have to do:
1) Run "rpm -q -a -l", which is going to spit out every file installed
by every package you have supposedly installed. 2) If you're fairly
certain that you only broke /usr/lib, grep the file list for
"/usr/lib", then hack up a short script to check if each file still
exist, and spit out the exact list of missing files.
3) Use "rpm -q -f" to find out which packages they belong to.
4) Make sure you have these RPMs available, and "rpm -e --force" each
one, followed by "rpm -i nodeps" to reinstall it.
5) Finally run ldconfig.
That should fix this, but it's probably easier to just chalk it up to
experience, and reinstall. If it's of any consolation, at least you
didn't wipe /lib, with the standard C runtime library. That would've
been a double-boner (actually, at least a quadruple-boner, on the
Richter scale),
Thanks for the advice Sam. I managed to get the rpms downloaded on to my desktop, extracted them and I kept on replacing dependencies until rpm came alive again.
I'll try something like what you have suggested soon.
I have a sneaky suspicion that you were trying to either install or
uninstall some external software package manually, without building
RPMs. That's the only reason I can think for screwing around in
/usr/lib, as root. And this is just one of the reasons why you should
never install various warez directly, manually, and you should always
use rpm. And if the warez doesn't come with a suitable rpm, then build
one yourself. The only reason for su-ing to root is to "rpm -i" the
freshly-built RPMs.
I feel like I should try and explain myself for this one!
I was playing around with installing linux on my ipaq. Its a h2200 and the linux port is nearly finished but not quite there.
I had the root file system on an SD card mounted at /media/usbdisk1
I needed to wipe the partition and install a new rootfs. In order to delete files owned by root, I needed to be root.
Something refused to delete in /usr/lib (on my SD card, i.e /media/usbdisk1/usr/lib).
So I'm at /media/usbdisk1 and I meant to type cd ./usr/lib, but I actually typed cd /usr/lib.
And then the final mistake: rm -rf ./*
I wondered for a second why it was taking so long as its a very small root file system. Then I realised, I hit crtl-c but I was way too late.
I think I've learned my lesson.
Alastair
