install hangs - no error messages

Hello,

I have done a search about the problem I'm having, but didn't really find anything. If it's been discussed to death before, please just point me to the correct threads. Here goes:

I have an Acer Aspire One (linpus) in which I have enabled the advanced mode. Everything was fine until about last night, when I decided that I wanted to install Skype. I downloaded the package from the Skype site (Fedora) and double clicked it. It prompted me for the root password (so far so good), I entered it, up popped the "Installing packages" box ....but it was completely blank, just a grey box with no text or buttons. I left it for about 20 minutes to see whether anything happened, then I killed it.

After that I tried the Add/Remove option in System. It doesn't do anything at all, the window doesn't even appear.

I started a terminal session, su'd to root and tried starting pirut. It just hangs. I can see the process running in the background, but nothing happens in the terminal window, not even error messages.

I tried yum clean all, just in case. That has been running for the last 30 minutes again with no messages whatsoever, so I expect that's hang too, so I'm going to go and kill it.

Any idea of what may have gone wrong and where I should look next? could it be a python issue?

I have added software before successfully, so this is something that has happened recently.

Thanks in advance,

Fede

 

This may have no effect on your machine, but mine has similarly hung during installations until I have ejected cards in the slots, then restarted the installation, which then completed perfectly.
So, it may be worth disconnecting any superfluous hardware and retrying.

 

ncc123 Thanks, but I don't think this is the problem I'm having. I've got no extra hardware, it's just a plain vanilla netbook as it came out of the box.

Fede

 

Anybody has any idea what could have gone wrong or what kind of diagnostics I could be running to pinpoint the problem? I am beginning to consider wiping the lot and installing Ubuntu instead.

Fede

 

Re: install hangs - no error messages - SOLVED

OK, I finally got it fixed. In case it helps anybody, the problem was a corrupted rpm repository, so all I had to do in the end was to rebuild it. Here's the sequence of commands that worked for me:

rm /var/lib/rpm/__db*

rpm --rebuilddb

yum clean all

Hope this is of use to others with the same issue.

Cheers,

Fede

 

Re: install hangs - no error messages - SOLVED

Not a corrupted rpm repository, but a corrupted rpm database on your hard drive. You did the right thing.