Help with reporting broken install

[Rick Stevens]

John Wendel wrote:
> I've installed Fedora on 3 boxes; 2 "everything" installs that worked 
> perfectly and 1"custom" install that is broken.
> 
> Problems on the "broken" box:
> 
> [1] The redhat admin tools don't run.
> 
> The programs are there, but they don't start. When run from the GUI 
> (both gnome and kde), nothing shows up. When run from the command 
> line, I get some text complaining about "xcdroast".

This was a fresh install?  xcdroast is GUI program for burning CDs
(I prefer gtoaster), and I can't imagine why the admin tools reference
it.

> I'm not sure what other programs might not work. All the stuff I 
> normally use seems to work fine, but I don't have a 
> warm-fuzzy-feeling about the system.
> 
> [2] The RPM db is hosed.
> 
> In an attempt to fix the admin tools, I tried to reinstall them. First 
> I did "rpm -e <tool-name>", which told me that <tool-name> was not 
> installed. So I mounted the CD, and did "rpm -i <tool-name>", which 
> told me that <tool-name> was already installed.
> 
> "rpm --rebuilddb" didn't fix the problem.

You must first go to /var/lib/rpm and delete the __db* files:

	rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db*

THEN run "rpm --rebuilddb".

> [3] Yum installs don't work.
> 
> I assume that this is caused by the broken RPM db. I tried "yum 
> install k3b", which resulted in trying to download hundreds of files 
> to satisfy the dependencies. I'm sure that these files were already 
> installed. I built k3b from the tarball and it works fine.

That's possible.  It could be that yum downloaded lots of newer files
that k3b needs.  It'd possibly help if you did "yum -d 10" or something
to get yum to spit out what problems it's having.

> I assume the next thing to do is to reinstall Fedora. But before I do, 
> is these any information that I could collect and file with a 
> Bugzilla report? I'm not sure what would be useful to someone looking 
> at this problem.

Try the above stuff.  If you do another install, make sure you have
the installer reformat the partitions.  An install of Fedora over an
existing RH9 system will sometimes screw up on python libraries (and
yum won't work).  A clean install fixes it.
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
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