Strange behavior in many commands after failed upgrade
 

Okay, I'm running Mandriva 2010.0, and I had this machine powered down for a few months. I fired it back up last night, and of course it wanted to upgrade a bunch of stuff, including telling me that there was a new version of Mandriva it wanted to install. I told it to go ahead and do all that, but then all the upgrades failed. I don't know if that was cause or symptom, but I suspect cause.

I didn't pay attention to the failures at first, partially because I wasn't sure I had everything up and running correctly, and partially because I was focused on other stuff. Now that I'm pretty sure everything is back up to where it was before, I can try to diagnose the problems.

The first problem is that trying to run some programs gives me an error like this:

I said, fine, I'll install a new terminal program:

Hunh. What the heck is aria2? Well, I see that I have a /usr/bin/aria2c ...

Maybe something went wrong with that and I need to reinstall it.

Wait, what? Maybe my urpmi db is corrupt or something ... ? Fine, just install it for the first time, then:

See that python error? That keeps popping up, over and over again, generally when I'm in the middle of doing something else. As best I can recollect, it's the same error I saw when the upgrades failed (like when I clicked on "Details"). But I didn't look that closely, unfortunately.

Here's the error again, not intermingled with other output this time:

But, note that despite the python error text, aria2 actually installed, it looks like. It's so far the only thing that I've gotten to install (or reinstall, FTM).

Preliminary Googling suggests that maybe this a glibc snafu. I even tried to reinstall glibc, but I got that same aria2 failure (which may have been for the best, in retrospect).

Anyone have any ideas? I'm sure you need more info from me, but I'm not sure what it is yet, so just let me know and I'm happy to provide it. :)

TIA.

Broken download in Mandriva
 

Aria2 is a download app. You probably used apt-get before. When asked to install aria2 you answered yes but the machine probably needed to have a regular upgrade first sans aria2. Perhaps you can uninstall aria2, I don't know.

You could also try and apt upgrade and say no to aria2.

Thanks, but the problem is definitely going deeper than aria2. I'm sure aria2 isn't throwing "undefined symbol: g_malloc_n", nor is aria2 likely to be throwing Python errors about unknown ASCII. Nonetheless, I've certainly got no problem with uninstalling it to get it out of the way as a suspect:

Okey dokey, looks good and gone. Now let's try installing something:

So ... any further thoughts? Anyone? Does anyone know what "You may need to update your urpmi database" means? TIA.

Problems installing
 

urpmi.update

it will give you some choices what you update.

Sorry for the long delays between replies; dealing with a newborn over here. :)

Okay.

Hmmmm ... okay, taking a stab in the dark here:

Hunh. Well, operating on the "no news is good news principle," maybe that actually did something.

Nope. <sigh>

Any other thoughts? I'm starting to feel like this is something like a gcc problem, or something along those lines.

Failed Upgrade
 

Congratulations on the new member of your family.

What I saw in your last screen capture or whatever way you got that info was the failure to find specific packages.
I have nothing terribly useful to suggest except.

Try manually downloading these missing packages and manually installing them.

If the package manager cannot find them and you get a 404 returned then the problem may not be with your machine (although I think it is);

When you download them install them manually running the rpm's, record any error message you get, check syslog and record any messages in the last ten or so lines.

Put the results of your effort and the error messages and parts of the syslog file that relate on this forum. I will look again and see what I can learn from the error messages.

Failed install
 

Just before you do any of the above put a marker in syslog like so:

echo "----- This is my marker ------" >> syslog

do it as su root and do it in /var/log.

Thanx. I also had some (minor) surgery and I'm recovering from that. So I'm very lame at responding. Sorry. :(

I'm copy-pasting out of the terminal window. I have two terminal windows that were open at the time the whatever-it-was occurred, so I'm still using those. I can't create any new ones though ... if I have a power failure and the machine goes down, I'll just be hosed. :)

I suspect that's more symptom than anything else. How about we go back to the original problem?

That produces nothing in syslog. Also, this:

which makes it very difficult if I'm trying to adjust config files or whatnot (currently, if I need to do anything like that, I'm ssh'ing in--which works--scp'ing the file, editing it, then scp'ing it back).

Still nothing in syslog. In fact, the majority of my syslog seems to be stuff like this:

That's just the last few lines; there are many more. The last thing before all those is this:

preceded by yet more auth failures.

Any of that getting anyone closer to seeing what's going on? Or maybe at least pinpointing the problem a bit better so I can try a new thread with a better title, maybe even in a better section?

Thanx to everyone who's been trying to help.