Software Manager (ie: MandrakeUpdate) hangs

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Username : Date : Action : Comments [ close all ]
Sjobeck : 24/12/01 10:48 AM : Incident created -   Whenever I launch MandrakeUpdate, it starts to load the list from "carroll.psu.edu" (ie: one of my sources that I defined) and gets to 21% and hangs. I cant do anything but kill it. This is happening for all users. What can I do? Can I remove this source? manually? how? can I unstall and reinstall the Software Manager? how? Thanks. Jason
Linegod_7611 : 24/12/01 10:00 PM : Reply received -   Try backing up and deleting the files in '/var/lib/urpmi' and '/etc/urpmi'
Sjobeck : 25/12/01 09:25 AM : More info provided -   Thanks very much for the reply, tips. I took your advice to the letter, tar balled everything in those two directories, then blew everythign inside those two directories away. May I ask a follow-up? When you launch either MandrakeUIpdate or Software Manager (by the way, are those both the same app?, just a different name?) it says: "can't find the /var/lib/urpmi/compssUser.flat file the tree mode won't be available". So I copied only that one file (ie: from my tarball) back to /var/lib/urpmi and re-launched the Software Manager. It opens because I see the hourglass like icon spinnign around down in the kicker for about 5 seconds, then it disappears. I guess it doesnt want to come up on the screen and let me use it. As you can probably guess, I'm a newbie at this, so I'm sorry I dont have any more hard facts or debugs or logs for you. So, if I then remove the file in question, launch it, hit OK to that prompt, it starts, shows me a list of a few MandrakeUpdate files that I need to download, so, OK, good, great, let's try that, so I choose one, a small one, some library, I dont know, hit "next" a couple of times, then it says "install in progress" forever. It never shows me any progress bars or prompts or anything, just in progress, forever. I can just hit the 'x' and close the window from here if I want to, but.......since I'm not ready to start doing every update and install manaully, I kinda need this app to do some work for me until I ge the hang of this. Any more advice, please, thank you, on what I can do next? Is there a way to edit the contents of this file, back to its 'default' or empty or something like that. Essentially, just put this file there, but not give it any crap to try to sort through, just an empty file that it can use as a base, and then let it write whatever it needs to in there itself. I might be off in the wild speculation area now, so I'll leave it here. Any and all advice is extremely appreciated. Jason Portland, Oregon, USA
Sjobeck : 25/12/01 09:27 AM : More info provided -   Holy cow, I'm talking to "linegod"? You're the 5th highest ranked expert. Wow! I sure do appreciate your time and advice. Thanks again. I'm grateful for taking the time for a newbie like me. Jason
Linegod_7611 : 25/12/01 06:43 PM : Reply received -   MandrakeUpdate and Software Manager are two different interfaces to the same base program 'rpmdrake' (which itself is just a front end to the command line program 'urpmi') And for some reason I always forget about compssUser.flat :) Run 'rpmdrake' from a console as root (this will give you the ability to view error messages). Click on 'Reload Lists' and then switch the view to 'Updates only' and the view to 'flat list'. Select a package and try to update. View the messages in the console to see if there are any errors. If this does not work, try the following: Run 'rpmdrake' from a console as root. When rpmdrake opens, click on 'Define Sources' and remove any sources you have, and then click 'New'. Select 'Updates' from 'Type of Source'. Click on 'update list of mirrors' and select a mirror near you (carroll is limited during the day to only a few connections, so you might try 'sunet.su') . Click OK, and you should see it getting the info in the console. Follow the same steps as above to get a package. If all else fails, you can do a forced overwrite of rpmdrake from the CD. # cd /mnt/cdrom/Mandrake/RPMS # rpm -Uvh rpmdrake*rpm --force
Sjobeck : 13/01/02 09:50 AM : More info provided -   OK, now I'm starting to fgeel silly.....I can not see the contents onf the CDROM. I can enter "cd /mnt/cdrom/" but can not see any directories, let alone change to them, past that. The CD is fine, it is the CD I used to install with, no scratches, just cant see any directories on it from either a command prompt or from inside Konqueror. Now what can I do? I think I do want to persue the manual overwrite of this application since I can not get the darn thing to behave itself. Or is there anything else I can do? Can I download this from the web if I cant get it from the CD? Where? How? How to install then (ie: from a file). Anything else I ought to do/know/try? Thanks for helping out a newbie who is struggling to get started. Baby steps, I guess. Thanks. Jason.
Linegod_7611 : 24/02/02 07:55 PM : Reply received -   Use 'mount /mnt/cdrom' as root and then 'cd /mnt/cdrom'
Sjobeck : 23/03/02 02:02 AM : More info provided -   Linegod, Thanks so much for your assistance, but . . . .. as life has turned out, I just finished my upgrade of this box to 8.2 and all seems well again relative to this issue, so I sort of side-stepped the issue. Thanks again. Jason
Linegod_7611 : 05/07/02 06:59 PM : Reply received -   If you could close this question, it would be appreciated.
Sjobeck : 05/07/02 07:15 PM : Incident closed -   LineGod was very helpful and I have every reason to believe that this advice would have worked (but my machine was flaky or something). But, more than anything, I apprecaite his wiilingness to lend me a hand. Very kewl. Thanks.

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