Stan Goodman wrote:
My VirtualBox program has become corrupted, and I wish to remove it and start over again from scratch. At the moment, it won't start at all. I find that reinstalling over what is there is not permitted, because there is a locked file. How can I unlock this file?
This is not the ose version of the program, I downloaded it from the VBox site.
This is what happens when I try to uninsstall: # rpm -e VirtualBox* error: package VirtualBox-3.1-3.1.4_57640_openSUSE111-1.x86_64.rpm is not installed
This will never work; since there is no package with the same name as the RPM. As others have posted, the correct command to remove VirtualBox is rpm -e VirtualBox-3.1
On the other hand, here is what happens when I try to reinstall: # rpm -U VirtualBox* warning: VirtualBox-3.1-3.1.4_57640_openSUSE111-1.x86_64.rpm: Header V4 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 6dfbcbae package VirtualBox-3.1-3.1.4_57640_openSUSE111-1.x86_64 is already installed #
When I try to reinstall from the user prompt, the response is: rpm -U VirtualBox* warning: VirtualBox-3.1-3.1.4_57640_openSUSE111-1.x86_64.rpm: Header V4 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 6dfbcbae error: can't create transaction lock on /var/lib/rpm/__db.000
Normally, this error message means that the command is not run as root. Since you quote your prompt as '#', I assume you are root. Then your RPM database is hosed. This is *not* a problem with VirtualBox or with the VirtualBox rpm. First, check that no rpm command is still running. ps -ef | grep rpm should show the grep command at max. Remove /var/lib/rpm/__db.000. Check if rpm -q 'VirtualBox*' outputs information about an installed VirtualBox. If yes, try rpm -e VirtualBox-3.1 If that still does not succeed, reestablish rpm's Packages database from backup: The backups are in /var/adm/backup/rpmdb. Take the last one that has a date before the start of your problems and gunzip it. (If it's the very last one in that directory, it should be identical to /var/lib/rpm/Packages.) Make a backup copy of your current /var/lib/rpm/Packages and then replace it with that file. Run rpm query and remove commands again, as cited above. Tell us if you succeeded. :-) Joachim -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Joachim Schrod Email: jschrod@acm.org Roedermark, Germany -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org