Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3729 mails)

[Anders Johansson <andjoh@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Saturday 07 June 2003 06.16, sdcoyote wrote:
> Hi Anders,
> I am a little confused about that procedure... can you explain it a little
> more... glibc.cpio ... what is that?
> thank you...

cpio is a package format much like tar, where all the files are basically 
streamed together in one big file. It is the internal package format used in 
rpm files. With the command rpm2cpio you can extract the cpio contents from 
an rpm package

rpm2cpio oldglibc.rpm > glibc.cpio

will do that, and put the cpio archive in a file called glibc.cpio

cd /

to go to the root of the file system

cpio -i < /path/to/where/you/created/glibc.cpio

will extract the contents of glibc to your file system, so you get the old 
glibc back

rpm -Uvh /path/to/oldglibc.rpm

won't do much with your file system, but you'll get a nice and tidy rpm 
database, so the rpm dependencies aren't broken.

It was my experience when I upgraded from 8.1 to 8.2 that rpm from 8.1 wasn't 
compatible with glibc 2.3, but both rpm2cpio and cpio were, so the above 
procedure should work to get you back to a working system

Next time take more care before trying to upgrade the glibc. It is probably 
the most difficult thing to get right of all the things you can do with a 
linux system. A kernel upgrade is a piece of cake by comparison