Tag Archive: archlinux


Pacman trouble again

Filed Under: English by andre — Leave a comment
18 July 2012

Pacman trouble again, This time, glibc is the culprit.

glibc
[###########################################] 100%
warning: /etc/locale.gen installed as /etc/locale.gen.pacnew
error: extract: not overwriting dir with file lib
error: problem occurred while upgrading glibc
call to execv failed (Bestand of map bestaat niet)
error: command failed to execute correctly
error: could not commit transaction
error: failed to commit transaction (transaction aborted)
Errors occurred, no packages were upgraded.

Well….. this leaves me with a broken C library. When this happens, do not close any windows or program as without the C library in place, it’s very hard to open a new shell. So…. since I was running pacman to upgrade stuff, which failed, I did have a root shell available, which is essential to fix this problem.

So, the situation, no program would start. It would just say file not found, but what file? Appearently the dynamic linker was broken. Running a program with the dynamic linker manually worked. For example
/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 /bin/ls

So, what we have to do… replace the required files manually. So, wehere to get them? We have to know pacman downloads its packages to /var/cache/pacman/pkg/. So, the file we are interested in is /var/cache/pacman/pkg/glibc-2.16.0-2-x86_64.pkg.tar

So, we are going to create a directory and extract the files. As we do have a broken dynamic linker, we need to prefix it manually


/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 /bin/mkdir blaat
cd blaat
/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 /usr/bin/xz -d /var/cache/pacman/pkg/glibc-2.16.0-2-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz
/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 /bin/tar -xvf /var/cache/pacman/pkg/glibc-2.16.0-2-x86_64.pkg.tar

Now, replacing the files…

/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 /bin/cp lib64/* /lib64

which leads to the next problem. We have mixed library versions now! We have replaced the /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 file however the /usr/lib/libc.so.6 is still the old version. Now we cannot execure anything! Lucky me, busybox provides statically linked binaries, which can solve this problem. Remember when I said not to close any window. I still had a browser open, so I could download this. Then using busybox, prefixing the path to busybox so copy the content of usr/lib to /usr/lib, and finally lib to /lib, making the system work again.

This my friends, was another day on ArchLinux. Feels like being on safari, doesn’t it?

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pacman problems in the arch

Filed Under: English by andre — Leave a comment
28 April 2012

When I tried to upgrade my system the other day I got the message

:: The following packages should be upgraded first :
pacman
:: Do you want to cancel the current operation
:: and upgrade these packages now? [Y/n]

This is nothing unusual per se, but what happened next was

resolving dependencies…
looking for inter-conflicts…
error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies)
:: gcc: requires gcc-libs=4.7.0-3

The solution is

[root@hp ~]# pacman -S libtool gcc gcc-libs
:: The following packages should be upgraded first :
pacman
:: Do you want to cancel the current operation
:: and upgrade these packages now? [Y/n] n

So, you have to specify libtool, gcc and gcc-libs at one time, else you will
run into a cross dependency problem pacman seems to be unable to solve itselve.
When it asks to upgrade pacman first, you should say no.

After this, you can upgrade pacman, and the rest of your system without issues.

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