unbelievably stupid mistake - i broke /usr/lib need help

[Robin Laing]

Kam Leo wrote:
> On 1/5/06, Alastair McKinley <amckinley03 at qub.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
>>>Alastair McKinley wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>Peter Skensved wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> I would start by backing up /root, /boot, /etc and /var
>>>plus anything installed in /usr/local and /home . Next get a list of
>>>all installed RPMs ( rpm -qa | sort  or  rpm -a --qf "%{NAME}\n" | sort )
>>>
>>>
>>>        and save them somewhere. With that information you can
>>>        probably reconstruct your laptop if everything fails ( this
>>>        assumes you always install binaries
>>>
>>
>>>from RPM files and stuff from random tar files in /usr/local )
>>
>>>Once you have done that run  rpm -Va  and save the output. This
>>>will give you a list of missing files. Try installing the missing
>>>ones with  rpm -Uv --force  . If that works then heck for .rpmnew files
>>>and try reconstructing any munged configuration files.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>        I've successfully done the above with a really clobbered file
>>>        system on a laptop.
>>>
>>>                                                 peter
>>>----
>>>
>>>Peter Skensved                          Email : peter SNO Phy QueensU CA
>>>Dept. of Physics,
>>>Queen's University,
>>>Kingston, Ontario,
>>>Canada
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>Hi Peter,
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>    Thanks for your advice. I managed to install enough libraries
>>>    manually to get rpm up and running again. What will the rpm -Uv
>>>    --force command actually do?
>>>
>>
>>Patrick Boutilier wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Reinstall the RPM (files as well) even though the RPM is already
>>>installed according to the RPM database.
>>
>>
>>Can yum do something similar and go and get the packages from the repos?
>>
> 
> 
> Install apt-get.
> 
> 
>>Alastair
>>
> 
> 

If you have been updating regularly without doing a yum clean, most of 
the packages will be stored in /var/cache/yum/* so you could just rpm 
them to install them.  Again, as they were already installed, the 
--force shouldn't cause any problems.  Once you have done that, then 
redo the rpm -Va.

Also, most of the distro's that I use don't support apt with FC4.