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!

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.