[KLUG Members] Crash of RH7.2 - advice?

[Adam Williams]

>NOTE:  I first sent this message out with a BSware heading,
>inappropriately so now I am remailing it with a more appropriate subject 
>line.
>This problem may have shown up in KLUG corespondence before but I can't 
>check because of the problem!
>Hello, all BS 7.2 users:
>I've had an unfortunate problem in upgrading my RH7.1 to RH7.2.
>[using BSware of course].  One rpm could not be loaded; then a crash

DO you remember which one?

>occurs after about 60% of the rpms have been loaded.  While I've saved 
>the crash data as suggested, I don't know how to use it.  When starting 
>the update, I am warned that my partitions are not what was expected but 
>that I could proceed.  I can get to my files in the rescue mode and can 
>update whatever rpm's I wish.  Actually the latter is a little dificult 
>since the new rpm's (pine for example) use more recent libraries but I 
>can't upgrade those since other programs depend on the older libraries. 
>My solution has been to force the installation of the new rpms, 
>leaving the old rpm's intact.  Not efficient use of disk space but so 
>far it works.

You can force the "upgrade" of packages, and liberal use of --nodeps
will let you put in new libraries regardless of "old" applications.

If the new kernel & kernel-BOOT packages were installed, completeing the
upgrade by hand isn't that hard.

Do an rpm -qa | grep lib to see more or less all the libraries you can
installed and upgrade those.  Some won't show up in that list like
ncurses, etc... But sooner or later another package will ask for those.

Don't forget you can do more than one package at a time, as in 
rpm -Uvh x.y.rpm a.b.rpm m.n.rpm  and this can be used to satisfy
dependencies as well. 

Then spin around and do the "applications",  with shells being first
bash, etc...

It really doesn't take that long, ~30 minutes.  I have to upgrade a
couple of my larger machines this way as the installer takes one look at
them and runs screaming of the end of a short pier.

>Right now I need to look at a gnumeric file.  I can't get into the
>Xwindows mode so I can't run gnumeric.  I can transfer the file to a
>floppy (alas, not a zip disk) and so take it to a non-crippled machine 
>but I have no access to another LINUX machine and I don't believe Excel 
>on my wife's more powerful system running ME will be able to read the
>gnumeric file.
>I may have to start a new installation but would appreciate any guidance
>at this awkward moment.

No hope of running another upgrade?  Although it would probably die at
the same point,  if you manually install the package it gagged on it
might work.

The gnumeric file is zipped XML.  If you just want the raw data any XML
parser should be able to show you that.