I'm running FC5-64 on an Athlon 3800+ dual core with an Asus MB and two Seagate SATA drives. In the past everything has run really smoothly but about a month ago I started having problems updating packages with yum and yumex. Numerous red error messages about download packages being incompatible with what was on the machine. It got so bad that if broke things to the point where I could no longer print, use samba, or even boot up. It seems like the only thing that I can update from the command line with yum is the kernel.

The only repository that I added was livna.org. and I'm not doing anything exotic.

After doing 3 complete re-installs, I thought that I would have it install everything but the servers in case things had changed and I was missing something. I then did a total update in case it was somehow not picking up all of the dependencies. No good. Got the initial splash screen and then under details saw messages for cups, samba, and NMB like "error while locating shared libraries LIBPAM 2.0..."

Did another complete install but in very carefully choosing what I would try to update, I'm back to getting a lot of red error messages under both yumex and yum. I have to think that the initial installation is ok, but something has gone wrong with the updating process.

I'm stumped considering how well things were running before. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Yum is not a good tool (at times) resolving dependency issues in a mixed mode environment (both 32-bit and 64-bit applications installed). You may find if you decrease the number updates yum (and yumex) work better. In other words try updating a small number (or even one at a time) of the application updates.

In some cases I have found that it better to just download the 64-bit updates (via yum) then by hand download the needed 32-bit updates into the same location as the 64-bit versions. I then install them all at once by typing something like;

rpm -Uvh *.rpm

Hint: got to keep the location fairly clean of older already installed packages.

Thanks for the feedback. Should I try apt or synaptic?

Also, is there a way of using wildcards with yum to get all of the associated files for an application?

Just a thought.

Thanks.

Synaptic is a GUI to apt and apt is even worse at resolving dependenices in a mixed mode environment (some say it is broken for this). You might want to read/review;

http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/yum/en/

From the URL;

To install the package group MySQL Database, enter the command:

su -c 'yum groupinstall "MySQL Database"'

Notice the single (') and normal (") quotemarks in the example above.

Ok, thanks.

Thanks Lenard! Your assistance is always appreciated.

Cheers,

Dave