OpenMotif removal leads to kernel panic - and no usable system

[IanWaring]

I'd been running FC6 on my Dell PowerEdge 600C/512Mb/80GB system for a day, when I decided to add more of the uninstalled screen savers... and inadvertently picked one of the OpenGL ones. The end result was that the install failed with a few build errors, citing conflicts with OpenMotif dependencies.... so I told yum to go remove OpenMotif.

End result was red crosses through all the desktop icons, then a kernel panic - and a system that wouldn't work. So, did a fresh "upgrade" to get the system back, which now boots fine - but I have no GUI at all, bash complains about knowing no "yum" command, and i'm wondering how to get the GUI back to do useful work... without having to rebuild all my web/mail infrastructure from scratch.

I have a DVD-RW drive on the machine - but haven't backed anything up onto it using a CLI.

Any ideas of anything I can try to get the install to put back all the FC6 X.org stuff? Or have I totalled it...

Ian W.

[Zotter]

Boot to run level 3 (CLI only - no GUI). you can edit /etc/inittab or execute 'init 3' from a terminal, or I think you can do a boot time command line option in grub - but I don't know that one.

Once in a terminal, run
yum install openmotif
and get it back.

That should get you back to 'operational'. You can then go back to init 5, re-edit your /etc/inittab or whatever.

Now - to fix that brain-dead, condescending and damned near useless joke called 'gnome-screesaver', run:
rpm -e gnome-screensaver

Ahhh, that's better. Now we can install what we expected and want.

yum install xscreensaver-base

If you want the gl stuff, then run or add to the above
yum install xscreensaver-base xscreensaver-extras xscreensaver-gl-extras
These are found in Fedora Extras - not on the install DVD

Extras also has things like:
xscreensaver-extras-gss
xscreensaver-gl-extras-gss

Good luck!

[IanWaring]

so bash plays "unknown command" if I try to use yum, pup or up2date. None of these present - other than some similar name .hdr files under /var/spool. I can't see any way to effect an upgrade off the booted CD that will put the useful apps back either.

Any ideas gratefully received.

Ian W.

[Zotter]

Did you 'su' to root? If so - exit and then use 'su -' <password> and try again.
su by itself doesn't load the different environment for root. su - does.

If that dont' fix it, then you're going to have to download the 'yum' rpm and install it first.

Try this as root:

rpm -ivh http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/cor...0-6.noarch.rpm

From there you can re-try the
yum install openmotif

Note: I got into mirrors.kernel.org fine from here, but if it times out on ya, try any of the other mirror sites listed here:
http://fedora.redhat.com/download/mirrors.html

[IanWaring]

Many, many thanks and sorry for being such a pain ... but I can't invoke rpm from the shell either, nor find it anywhere in the file system (cd / followed by find . -name rpm*|more). All the data files and headers seem to be there in various rpm directories, just no executable binary.

I also don't seem able to mount the dvd to transfer it by hand from there.

If I try an upgrade again, it puts in the kernel on but stops short of adding all the commands you don't typically find with a raw kernel. Any ideas what the upgrade samples to decide it doesn't need to add these in? Or how to get the rpm image over from the install dvd??

Ian W.

[IanWaring]

... and now I have the distribution DVD mounted, there is no rpm binary to be seen... only RPMs for rpm and for yum. Recursion, see Recursion!

So, it looks like I backup two or three directory trees onto DVD-RW and install afresh, or work out how to shrink my (live) file system partition so I can do a fresh install in a separate partition. Unless anyone has any other thoughts :-}

Ian W.

[IanWaring]

All fixed now - I managed to get rsync up and running, backed up my key files onto my work laptop, and then did a fresh install. All working fine again now.

Ian W.