How to fix a corrupted RPM database

The first time I had a problem with a corrupted RPM database was when I installed Mandriva 2011 to my daughter's computer.  No matter what I did, the Mandriva Control Center would refuse to fetch packages and would throw an error message to my face.

In desperation, I looked for help and found it in one thread posted in one of Mageia's forum.  The post described how to solve the situation easily with the help of Konsole.  I can't find that original post, but found this one, which gives the same information.

So far, I have used the process to fix that Mandriva 2011 RPM database and one in Mageia's Betas.

I even had to use it three weeks ago in my last Mandriva 2010.2 installation, when the Mandriva repositories went down and I made some stupid mistakes while adding repos.

Since the process is so useful, I'm going to post it here in case someone needs it:

1.  Open Konsole and type su
2.  Type your root password
3.  Write rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db*
4. Now you need to rebuild the database, so write  rpm --rebuilddb
5. You can now close Konsole and open the control center to add the repositories from the GUI.  Of course, you can do that with the terminal, too.

If you run PCLinuxOS and happen to hit the same problem, Texstar wrote a detailed forum post about what to do.  You can check it here.


You can always find good help if you are willing to read a bit.

Mandriva goes community-based

After so many months of suspense, the official announcement has been made: Mandriva, as a Linux distribution, will become a community-led project.


This decision has been received with enthusiasm by the community, whose disenchantment with the direction that Mandriva SA had taken kept growing.

The business strategy of the former parent company remains undisclosed, though.

However, one wonders if this move was made too late.  Mageia's popularity has increased.

And there's ROSA, too.

Even though some people assert that Mageia has simply fulfilled a temporary need of Mandriva users who now can go back to using their favorite Linux distro, the argument is not convincing. 

One thing is sure: if there is still a thriving Mandriva community, it will have to work hard to rescue their distro from the pit of irrelevance where it is buried right now.  And, in so doing, they will at last prove that their long-used claim blaming the company for the shortcomings of the distro was legitimate.

Busy weekend with Mageia, LibreOffice, and Liberté

After an intense week, I decided to forget about work this weekend and have some time for my hobby, software testing.  So, I downloaded Mageia 2 RC, LibreOffice 3.4.5, and a Linux distro that I had never heard of: Liberté 2012.1.

Mageia 2 RC
I upgraded my Mageia 2 Beta 3 VirtualMachine and... absolutely nothing happened.  Before some hasty conclusions, I mean NOTHING BAD happened; all my software works, even the Japanese IME with iBus. I guess I will wait until they release the final version to try it on real hardware and to see if my netbook works better with Mageia 2 or if I should keep the previous release.

LibreOffice
I had a previous version, so I upgraded it to have the cool OpenGL effects.  However, I was impressed the most by the great PDF editing feature: with an office suite that can edit PDFs as easily as any other ODF document, MSOffice looks like a real software dinosaur.

The only drawback is that I have not figured out how to enable SCIM to work with it, so I must keep OpenOffice in my Mandriva 2010.2 box to type in Japanese.

Liberté
I must confess that I felt a little anxious about downloading a distro that is so anonymous that even its origin remains undisclosed in DistroWatch.  However, as it is 210MB, I gave it a try.  It enabled Tor and booted without any problem.  Web browsing is done with Gnome Browser.  Liberté includes Abiword for document production and Pidgin as the IM client.  There was no GIMP for image-editing software, which is logical because the purpose of this distro is private communication.  The best part for me is that this distro boots an IME in live mode that includes Anthy for Japanese writing and it works flawlessly with Abiword.  Vive la Liberté !

In my humble opinion, the three of them are promising.

Now I'm downloading the final release of ROSA Marathon...

Mandriva: A new appeal to the community

In a corteous and somewhat longer-than-usual post, Jean Manuel Croset has communicated with the Mandriva community again to inform some details of the situation (always mentioning that he is unable to disclose as much information as he would like) and to throw a new date on the table.  This time, it is the third week of May, the moment in which the company will unveil its roadmap.

I don't know if this is soothing or stirring, but I can't help hear the Shakespearean soothsayer warning: "Beware the ides of May, Julius Caesar"

ROSA has already got a lot of attention and many of us also love Mageia, which is about to send into the wild its release candidate of Mageia 2.


Let us see how these two facts affect Mandriva.