Hi:

I was following a document to load some libraries for a GIS internet mapping app called Mapserver. Part of the doc called for "cleaning up" the libgd libraries. Problem is, I executed a rm -f /usr/lib/libgd* when it should have been libgd.*

Well, I cam caught in the deadly "INIT:ID "X" Respawing too fast" cycle.

Any ideas what I need to restore?

Thanks

Mark

P.S. This is Redhat 8 running on i386 platform.

Yeah, you blew away the GD graphics library and the GDBM database library. Looks like your desktop needs them. :-) Boot it to runlevel 3 instead of 5 and use it in text mode. From there you can use rpm to assess the damage. Probably just forcing a re-install of the "gd" and "gdbm" packages would fix things. I'm not sure why your app's docs said to remove the GD libraries, that doesn't sound like a good idea to me.

BTW: you can find out if files are owned by any installed package by using a pipe such as this one:
/bin/ls /usr/lib/libgd* | xargs -n 1 rpm -qf | sort -u
If there's any output, then you know that you shouldn't remove those files because something else depends on them. I know, that won't prevent accidents like yours, but maybe it will help you down the road.

Yep, thanks for that. Still learning. Got it back up by forcing the GD back in. Not sure what you meant by using RPM to assess the damage. a Rehat RPM?


That command will come in handy. I need to know about dependencies. Do you know of a good Linux book that tells how to do all the command line stuff to check for dependencies, how to load and manage libraries etc?

Thanks

Mark