Re: Failure of rpmdrake/urpmi and other applications

On 27/09/10 00:53, Len Lawrence wrote:
>
> Disk errors would spring to mind but I think can be ruled out given 
> that this problem is not unique to my system.  It seems unlikely that 
> other users would have experienced exactly the same disk corruption if 
> that were the cause.  I was loath to invoke badblock checks during 
> formatting because it takes a devil of a long time on a 52 Gb partition.
>
Replying to my own post...

Reinstallation this morning, on the Dell XPS  M1730.  All went well, as 
before.
Used Firefox and added repositories via Easyurpmi (Mandriva and PLF).  
Brought ruby and tk up to scratch then tried installing Thunderbird and 
that was the problem.  The following is a rough summary:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
urpmi mozilla-thunderbird

Accessing Main updates

lib64nss3                3.12.7         0.1mdv2010.1      x86_64
mozilla-thunderbird      3.0.8          0.1mdv2010.1      x86_64

Installing the library caused a scriptlet failed message, exit status 127.

The tbird installation issued several errors and warnings on files in 
the /usr/share/applications tree concerning unregistered media type, old 
media type and invalid MIME type.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thereafter urpmi would not work, nor firefox, and of course not thunderbird.
All return the libnssutil3 error reported before.

So, does it look as if thunderbird is overwriting the correct version of 
lib64nss3?  If so, is there a way to fool thunderbird into thinking that 
the version it wants is already installed?  I suspect that renaming will 
not work.  From experiments in the past it would appear that libraries 
store their own names somewhere internally.  Unfortunately I did not 
think to check which version was on disk before trying to install 
thunderbird.  This problem must have affected other thunderbird users, 
even back in 2010.0, yet there is very little discussion about it on the 
net and nothing in the errata.

Meanwhile I shall reinstall (#3) and ignore thunderbird for the time 
being.  If the problem cannot be fixed I shall have to bin 2010.1 and 
that would be a pity because apart from this fault it is the best 
distribution ever.

Len