I recently updated a server from fc3 to fc6. All seemed to go well
except the first yum attempt to update the machine failed and when I
entered synaptic I received a ton of errors about duplicate rpms
installed on the machine. I've run into this issue before.
Unfortunately neither yum nor synaptic has a way to deal with it, as far
as I can tell.
Rather than manually go through the list of offending rpms and delete
them, I did things semi automatically. There were 120 duplicate rpms on
my machine, so manually typing the full package names would have taken a
while.
Here is what I did instead.
1) Generate a list of all the rpm packages installed.
$rpm -qa --queryformat '%{name}\n' > pkglist
This generates an unsorted list that looks like this.
libavc1394
libmusicbrainz
ethtool
desktop-file-utils
less
time
libXrandr
rmt
2) Sort the list and find the duplicates
$sort -g pkglist | uniq -d > duplicates
This list will look like
a2ps
anacron
at
audit
...
3) Generate a list of the packages with versions to look at and edit
I created a small script file called dupWithVersions with this in it
for pkg in `cat duplicates`; do
rpm -q $pkg
done
Redirect the output to another file like this. $dupWithVersions
>removeList
The remove list will look like this:
a2ps-4.13b-57
a2ps-4.13b-57.fc6.3
anacron-2.3-41.fc6
anacron-2.3-44.fc6
at-3.1.8-82.fc6
at-3.1.8-84.fc6
audit-1.2.8-1.fc6
audit-1.3-2.fc6
Go through the remove list and manually remove the versions you want to
KEEP ! Remember this is a list of rpms you want to remove !
4) Remove the rpms in the remove list.
To do this I generated a little script as follows:
for pkg in `cat removelist`; do
rpm -e $pkg
done
This process quickly and correctly removed the duplicate rpms from my
machine.
I hope this helps someone.
--
Kim Lux, Diesel Research Inc.
