yum/PackageKit/seg fault/lock-up

[jlfessler]

As you can see from the title, I'm dealing with a few issues. So here's the cliff notes version:
1 ) attempted "preupgrade" from FC8 to FC10... lock-up during later stage of installation, resulting in hosed OS, file system, or something... repartitioned disk and installed FC10 with a netinst CD... seemed to work OK

2 ) started experiencing video oddities while running PackageKit's update utility... screen, mouse and keyboard would freeze... screen showed various color changes at various spots.

3 ) suspected on-board video... replaced with geforce 8400gs... (smolt output attached)

4 ) PackageKit still locked up either during routine update run or from manual start (no color oddities and rest of system seemed operative and responsive)... gets to "Testing Changes" task and goes no further... let it run over 10 hours to make sure I wasn't just impatient... subsequent executions of PackageKit stall while "waiting for task" - I'm guessing it's the hung "testing changes" task.

5 ) used yum to remove PackageKit and reinstall... no improvement

6 ) seemed like common lock-up point was during a Firefox update... used "yum clean all", then yum remove Firefox... yum reports "There are unfinished transactions remaining. You might consider running yum-complete-transaction first to finish them.", but continues to run... then produces an error dialog (content attached).

7 ) run yum-complete-transaction as recommended by yum... produces much output (attached) and ends with Segmentation fault.

8 ) I'm out of ideas

Is there anyway out of this mess?

Thanks

Regards, -Joe

[Rubberman]

You need to run a diagnostic on your motherboard, memory, and disc drives. Something is seriously hosed, and since you installed an add-on video card which fixed the video problems (as far as I can tell from your comments), that leaves everything else. Have you had any power outages, brown-outs, surges lately? What kind of surge-suppression system and/or UPS are you using?

[jlfessler]

No power outages since well prior to the FC8/10 upgrade... brown outs?? not sure - no other evidence of them. Power supply is off a dedicated circuit, no UPS, but I am using a fairly reliable surge suppressor.

I've run the memory test off the FC10 install CD. Let it run for well over 12 hours and there were no reported errors.

I've not run any hd diagnostics - don't know of any, so suggestions would be appreciated. It's and EIDE 250GB, unsure of the make.

Odd part about this is that nothing other than PackageKit seems affected... that, and the seg fault from yum. Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, media apps... all seem to run just fine. No lock-ups or hung apps with anything else I've used.

[Rubberman]

No power outages since well prior to the FC8/10 upgrade... brown outs?? not sure - no other evidence of them. Power supply is off a dedicated circuit, no UPS, but I am using a fairly reliable surge suppressor.

I've run the memory test off the FC10 install CD. Let it run for well over 12 hours and there were no reported errors.

I've not run any hd diagnostics - don't know of any, so suggestions would be appreciated. It's and EIDE 250GB, unsure of the make.

Odd part about this is that nothing other than PackageKit seems affected... that, and the seg fault from yum. Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, media apps... all seem to run just fine. No lock-ups or hung apps with anything else I've used.

Have you tried an older version of PackageKit?

[jlfessler]

No, I haven't. I think the version currently installed is 0.3.15-2. Does that sound right? In KDE at least, there doesn't seem to be a way of getting the version info directly from the app... such as from the Help menu.

I'm not sure how to accomplish installing an earlier version. Any tips?

Thanks.

-J

[Rubberman]

No, I haven't. I think the version currently installed is 0.3.15-2. Does that sound right? In KDE at least, there doesn't seem to be a way of getting the version info directly from the app... such as from the Help menu.

I'm not sure how to accomplish installing an earlier version. Any tips?

Thanks.

-J

What about the web site? PackageKit - Main Page - you should be able to download an older version if necessary, or build it from scratch, which will probably deal with your dependency issues better. If you want to download and build source, you need the git source control application.

[jlfessler]

Didn't have the stomach for compilation and didn't find an rpm for an earlier version of PackageKit. So...

With PackageKit and Firefox uninstalled, and since PackageKit seemed to reliably fail during a Firefox update, I tried installing Firefox using yum.

Got this:
rpmdb: page 216075402: illegal page type or
format
rpmdb: PANIC: Invalid
argument
rpmdb: PANIC: fatal region error detected; run
recovery
rpmdb: PANIC: fatal region error detected; run
recovery
rpmdb: PANIC: fatal region error detected; run
recovery
etc.

Using the Google showed efforts (some from several years ago) to solve this by deleting the __db files from /var/lib/rpm and then running rpm --rebuilddb. Once this was done, I tried yum update and then yum install firefox. Both ran without incident... other than the pesky note about needing to run yum-complete-transaction. Odd, but does not seem to matter (yet).

At this point, I'm not sure if I will reinstall PackageKit, wait for FC11, or maybe try another distro.

This seems to be a pretty nerdy way to correct the condition (if in fact it did), and since I'm a nerd, I guess that's OK. I'm just thinking it doesn't further Linux desktop adoption.

Thoughts?

-J

[Rubberman]

As someone said, "Whatever works...". I do agree that this sort of stuff re. standardized and robust package management among other things, is sorely needed before Linux can become ubiquitous on the desktop. Also, getting a younger generation "hooked on Linux" is important as well. I'm happy to report that my pre-teen grandson who let the smoke out of his Windows drive for the laptop I gave him last year, has found that the other drive I gave him, with Ubuntu on it, works and that he loves it! He's a budding engineer and quite the electro-mechanical genius. His favorite hobby is building radio-controlled aircraft from spare parts, and he is using the laptop to do his designs on.