On 2018-08-11 22:20, don fisher wrote:
On 08/10/2018 11:40 PM, Basil Chupin wrote:
You haven't responded to my earlier post suggesting to you to start afresh: format your HD and install whatever version of openSUSE you have -- I think you are able to install 42.3. Do that and then after you have this running we can go then walk you thru on how to install the latest, new, kernel. OK?
BC
I have ordered a new PCIe NVMe - M.2 Internal SSD to build a new system on. No std hard drives in this system. The SSD is not due to arrive for a week or so. I would be anxious to try the walk thru you suggest at that time. I am not against the RPM database concept. I just did not realize it was used to keep track of installed versions etc. I once asked on this list for documentation describing the system architecture and did not receive any relevant responses. RPM originally stood for Red Hat Package Manager. I started under Red Hat and did not realize RPM was critical to opensuse. I would gladly have used the rpm --erase if I had known it was relevant. It is certainly easier than deleting all of the files in /boot and repairing the links.
Contrary to Windows, an RPM based Linux system keeps track of what is installed in a database. On Windows, to install something, it is simply installed on top of what exists already, overwriting it if it happens to use the same directory, or otherwise having the same thing installed on several different paths, known only to the applications that use them. Thus to repair things, you re-install. On Linux, when you tell YaST to install/update/remove something, it _thinks_. What is already installed, what is needed to do to obtain what the user is requesting. And to do so it queries the database of installed packages, and updates it with the changes. Every single file that was installed from a package is listed there (exceptions are files created locally by installation scripts). Thus if you delete a file manually YaST/zypper/rpm will think that the file is still there and the decisions it takes will be based on that knowledge, that happens to be wrong because you deleted something. If you *only* deleted some files in /boot, consequences are probably not that important. Maybe. Just remove the packages that had them and issue solved. But if you are in the habit of deleting installed files, things get unpredictable. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 42.3 x86_64 "Malachite" at Telcontar)