sábado, 14 de septiembre de 2019

An Easy Fix for a Stupid Mistake

I waited a long time for Mageia 7 and for OpenMandriva Lx 4.  When both distros arrived, I was very happy.

But new distros bring changes, and sometimes it is not easy to adapt.  Mageia 7 has been rock-solid: it is doing a great job in my laptop and both in my daughter's desktop and in mine.  There is one thing, though.  I have been avoiding a strange mesa update that wants to remove Steam.

OpenMandriva is also fantastic, but this new release provided options like rock, release, and rolling.   When I first installed the distro,  I chose rock because I was shying away from the rolling flavor.  Eventually, I had to move to rolling because that was the only way in which I could manage to install Steam in both my laptop and desktop machines.

And then, disaster came to the desktop.  I forgot to update packages in over a month.  Logically, when I attempted the update, kwin was not operational.  I reinstalled as rock and, curiously, this time installing Steam was possible.  So, that took care of the problem.

I then started the update in the laptop.  Since I had been installing upgrades more frequently, I assumed that the process was going to be painless.

I stumbled upon a large update and, just like with the desktop, I had problems.  The screen lock was broken and, even though I tried the recommended method (Ctrl+Alt+F2 to switch to a virtual terminal, then running loginctl unlock-session c2 and then switching back to the running session with Ctrl+Alt+F1), I got an error message.

So, the installation was not completed and the desktop had several issues, like kwin crashing, dragora failing to retrieve the database, and losing widgets and icons.

I was prepared to reinstall as rock, but I thought that maybe I could use dnf to complete the installation.  Dnf showed me that the database was corrupted.

I decided to try rpm --rebuilddb  and then dnf upgrade

That did the trick.  Now OpenMandriva is fully operational on my laptop!





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