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I'm on a deadline, help me please


Guest thenthenio
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Guest thenthenio

Hallo everybody.

I'm new to this forum.

I arrived here from the mandrivaitalia forum where I can't get answers for my problems.

I installed many months ago Mandriva 2007 and then Cooker.

More or less almost everything was working correctly (including beryl).

Few weeks ago the USB keys started not being mounted anymore automatically but only with mount command.

After many tries reinstalling hal and udev I decided to try installing a new kernel.

The former one was 2.6.17-5 and this is now 2.6.17-9.

After reboot X did not start any more, I think it is due to the fact that my nvidia 9746 is not any more correctly loaded.

I did some tries yesterday evening but X never started.

Today it started again (I absolutely don't know how come), but I think with generic driver.

Then a number of new problems arised that I do not even know where to start from.

I'll give you the most important:

- My KDE environment does not start and exits immediately to che login screen.

- Other login work but the root shell starts and closes immediately.

- Running a normal user shell it works but when i type su it immediately answers (in Italian): "su: wrong password", but I did not even had the chance to type it!

- Running drakconf it gives (in Italian) something like "su gave an error".

At this point I'm on a dead end: I cannot change to root and I cannot reinstall anything (for example reinstall su command which is not working)!

If I go to the character console I can login as root (su does not work neither here), the problem is that I do not know what package su is included in.

Moreover if I try to urpmi the former kernel it looks not anymore available for install.

 

Can anybody help me?

Many thanks.

Mauro

 

 

[moved from Installing Mandriva by spinynorman - welcome aboard :)]

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Mauro,

 

Playing with cooker can sometimes be bothersome. I am not sure that any forum can help you with this type of problem as noone can duplicate your specific install as we do not know what parts of cooker you have installed and which packages versions are being used etc. I sure hope you are not using your computer for anything critical!

 

With so many problems at the same time I am sure there is no easy fix to get you back to where you would like to be. Sounds like at a minimum you have a mismatch on the kernel and video driver which is causing X to have issues. May want to try reverting back to a generic driver to get that going again. Long time ago I had similar problems when playing with cooker and the only real fix was to reinstall the base distribution again.

 

Short of a full fresh reinstall, you may want to reinstall Mandriva 2007 and try the upgrade option. I have never tried such an experiment with a cooker install however, and I am not sure what you will get as many installed packages may be newer than the installing versions.

 

Maybe someone else may have a few ideas for you to try?

 

-Bill

Edited by congdonb
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Cooker is a testing environment, and problems should be expected. They will get fixed however, but you'd probably have to join the Cooker mailing list, or be a part of the development process.

 

Otherwise, stick with Mandriva 2007, which is stable, but of course not always the newest of packages.

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Guest thenthenio

Hello Bill,

yes, I thought the same thing, but, like you, I'm afraid that the most of the packages would not be overwritten because the Cooker's are newer, so probably it isn't worth it.

The very strange thing is that all this happened when I moved to kernel-2.6.17-9, I did not change anything else!

In order to regain the control of my Linux box it would be enough, I think, to recover the su command, do you know what package it is included in? Or is there an easy way, from command line, to look for it inside all packages?

Another think I would like to do is to revert to the original kernel-2.6.17-5 but doing urpmi kernel-2.6.17-5 gives a list of kernel modules but not the real kernel, other kernels are available but not my original one.

If nobody can help me I think I will restart from a clean Mandriva Free 2007 and then move to Cooker after, important data are in different partition/disks from OS installation.

 

Ciao

Mauro

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You can find out what package su is in by doing this:

 

whereis su

 

this should tell you it exists as /bin/su. So, then you can do:

 

rpm -qf /bin/su

 

and it will then tell you what package this belongs to. I'm not on Mandriva right now, so can't give you the exact result you should see, but it's probably in coreutils or something like that.

 

As for your kernel, try this:

 

urpmf --name kernel | grep 2.6.17.5

 

it should show a lot of results, including:

 

kernel-2.6.17.5mdv

 

so, if that is the case, try:

 

urpmi kernel-2.6.17.5mdv

 

and then go from there. Of course you need to reboot, and use this kernel and hopefully get back to where you were. If not, then your only chance is go back to Mandriva 2007. But, do you really need to upgrade to Cooker after that? Chances are all your problems might occur again. Remember, Cooker is highly volatile and unstable.

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It could be so many things.... it could be as simple as noone tested with the Italian language packs?

 

What seems to have happened though is a chain reaction.... and you seem to have spotlighted it with the kernel change....

 

I think your short term solution could be to use a LiveCD... finish your work and make sure its all safe.

 

If you reinstall cooker later you might want to consider installing twice if you have diskspace ... make a minimal install with only what you need so the next time cooker wrecks your system (which it will) you have a bootable working version....

 

Having the bootable working version can also help you work out what went wrong....

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I have seen the mounting porblem when upgrading from XFce 4.3.99.2 (RC2) to 4.4.0 official from Mandriva -- apparently the packages for thunar were not compiled with HAL support. Obviously this does not apply if you are not using thunar & Xfce (as it seems). For the rest I think I cannot add to the otehr advcie & comments.

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2.6.17-9 is the stable kernel. He seems to have a mixed stable-cooker system which is AFAIK even worse than a pure cooker system. I think he should decide what does he want. If he wants the latest and greatest, and it seems like he wants that, then use the backports tree or upgrade to cooker entirely.

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Guest thenthenio

For the su command it does not allow me to overwrite the existing (I did not find any options for overwriting):

# urpmi coreutils-5.97-5.1mdv2007.0

Package coreutils-5.97-5.1mdv2007.0.x86_64 is already installed

 

For the kernel it seems that my original kernel is not any more available:

# urpmf --name kernel | grep 2.6.17.5

em8300-kernel-2.6.17-5mdv

fuse-kernel-2.6.17-5mdv

lirc-kernel-2.6.17-5mdv

ndiswrapper-kernel-2.6.17-5mdv

nozomi-kernel-2.6.17-5mdv

abituguru-kernel-2.6.17-5mdv

adm8211-kernel-2.6.17-5mdv

cdemu-kernel-2.6.17-5mdv

fusion-kernel-2.6.17-5mdv

mcs7830-kernel-2.6.17-5mdv

pwc-kernel-2.6.17-5mdv

qc-usb-messenger-kernel-2.6.17-5mdv

spca5xx-kernel-2.6.17-5mdv

visdn-kernel-2.6.17-5mdv

vloopback-kernel-2.6.17-5mdv

zaptel-kernel-2.6.17-5mdv

zd1211-kernel-2.6.17-5mdv

 

Many thanks for your help.

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I'd suggest connecting to a Mandriva mirror, and downloading the kernel-2.6.17.5mdv manually and then installing it. You'll find this under the Mandriva 2007 repositories, probably in Main.

 

Since your original install was Mandriva 2007, and now since you use Cooker repositories, this is probably why it's not available to you.

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You should use the --allow-force (or something like that see man page) of urpmi to install coreutils anyway.

I thought of that then reread the title of the thread....

 

Your distro is mixed up.... (not you Dexter :D) its not easy to guarantee anything except a clean install so Given your "deadline" I really would just use a LiveCD... and sort out the messed up mixture after you have done this....

 

Its my experience that when working to a deadline with a mixed up sources distro you are more likely to mess things up further.

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Guest thenthenio

Yes, I agree with you all... in fact I reinstalled Linux Mandriva 2007.0 from scratch.

Then moved again to Cooker.

Now almost all things are working.

I have some problems with nVidia driver 9746 (it look like it is loaded but it seems not all accelerations are working), Beryl (when I start it the desktop becomes 3D but it gets corrupted soon after), Ekiga (it starts and closes immediately), Acrobat Reader plugin for Mozilla (it refuses installing because libGLU.so.1 is missing but this lib isn't included in any available packages)...

 

Many thanks anyway, I will ask how to solve the remaining problems in their correct forum sections.

Mauro

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Yes, I agree with you all... in fact I reinstalled Linux Mandriva 2007.0 from scratch.

Then moved again to Cooker.

Now almost all things are working.

I have some problems with nVidia driver 9746 (it look like it is loaded but it seems not all accelerations are working), Beryl (when I start it the desktop becomes 3D but it gets corrupted soon after), Ekiga (it starts and closes immediately), Acrobat Reader plugin for Mozilla (it refuses installing because libGLU.so.1 is missing but this lib isn't included in any available packages)...

 

Many thanks anyway, I will ask how to solve the remaining problems in their correct forum sections.

Mauro

I feel I'm issing something...?

Your on a deadline yet you install cooker? and reinstall it? Then add Beryl on top?

 

Each problem is probably solvable, some might take a finite time (if the sources are mixed up)... so it won't be repaired until the cooker sources are....

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