On Sun, 2006-10-01 at 19:53 -0400, Carl Hartung wrote:

On Sunday 01 October 2006 19:42, Dave Barton wrote:

...

Any attempt to add/remove or update software causes Yast to crash. Have tried repair from the 10.1 boot DVD, but this also crashes Yast when checking the packages.

I suspect that the package database has been corrupted in some way, but rpm --rebuilddb does not help.

Is there any way to fix this, other than the Windows way of reinstalling?

Hi Dave,

Is there a history behind this situation? When did it first arise and what did you do, if anything, just prior?

Carl

Hi Carl, There is not really a lot of history here. In the early days of 10.1 I tried and gave up on the "zen-updater" and YOU, but manually running the Yast "software management" has been working well for months and I have not had any problems getting the updates I wanted. The problem arose just a couple of days ago. I am not aware of doing anything specific or different before this happened. It started when I tried to add one package from the 10.1 DVD (no dependency issues) and Yast just simply froze for about 60-90 minutes and finally crashed. I did reboot to init 3 as root and tried to run Yast, but it crashed with: sbin/yast2: line233: 3343 Segmentation fault $ybindir/yastbase menu ncurses $NCTHREADS The only other thing I have noticed is that if I reboot there is a large amount of modem/router activity between this box and the internet that I never saw previous to this situation. It almost seems as if Yast is trying to continue where it left off or is trying to refresh sources. But that's nothing more than a guess on my part. Regards Dave

On Mon, 2006-10-02 at 11:49 +1100, Dave Barton wrote:

There is not really a lot of history here. In the early days of 10.1 I tried and gave up on the "zen-updater" and YOU, but manually running the Yast "software management" has been working well for months and I have not had any problems getting the updates I wanted.

The problem arose just a couple of days ago. I am not aware of doing anything specific or different before this happened. It started when I tried to add one package from the 10.1 DVD (no dependency issues) and Yast just simply froze for about 60-90 minutes and finally crashed. I did reboot to init 3 as root and tried to run Yast, but it crashed with:

sbin/yast2: line233: 3343 Segmentation fault $ybindir/yastbase menu ncurses $NCTHREADS

Is it possible that you have a half complete update in there? That some yast packages have been updated while others haven't? This could cause a crash

On Mon, 2006-10-02 at 14:27 +1100, Dave Barton wrote:

Yes that was my thought too. Do you think if I removed all the Yast rpms and reinstalled the originals from the DVD, it would resolve the issue without breaking my whole system?

If that is indeed the problem, then yes, that should solve it You could also have a look at the update directory on the ftp server, and see if all are up to date. Getting all up to the latest version should also work, if the problem is a version mismatch If it doesn't work, I would suggest getting an strace of yast, to see what happens just before it crashes. This can point the way to where the problem lies

I am loathed to completely dump my system and reinstall, because it has taken me a long time to get 10.1 working the way I want it.

I can imagine, but a complete reinstall is rarely necessary - although fixing a system without one can sometimes take a bit of time, there will almost always be a way of doing it