Uninstalled too many packages, but don't know what to put back

qscomputing · 03-31-2006, 07:55 AM

Hi all,

OK, this is probably a very strange request. I discovered that my Linux HD was almost completely full, so I decided to go through my system and remove what I don't need. As I use Mandriva 2006 Free, my first port of call was the remove packages part of MCC.

I removed quite a lot of packages and all seemed well... until I tried to reboot my machine. I then noticed that none of the following were working:
1. Mounting my vfat and ntfs partitions.
2. Detecting the filesystem of a CDROM and mounting it.
3. Network (iwconfig is gone).
4. USB.
5. ACPI, or something related to it, as my battery monitor is not working.
6. Judging from the boottime messages, ALSA.

I know why these things are missing (I was daft enough to uninstall them!), but I can't remember what I uninstalled, and I was daft enough not to keep a log (unless it creates one automatically). So, can anyone suggest which packages I might have accidentally uninstalled, so that I can install them again?

I think I may have a Knoppix CD lying around somewhere, so I can still get data in and out of my computer. I will post the output of rpm -qa later, when I can find the Knoppix disk.

Apologies for the strange question; let me know if there's any more useful info I can provide as I'm sure to have missed something out. :-)

Oh, and is this the right part of the forum?

Thanks very much,
- QS Computing.

bigrigdriver · 03-31-2006, 08:40 AM

Take a look in /var/adm/rpm/backup/rpmdb. That's where rpm stores backup copies of rpms rebuilddb command. Create two tmp directories somewhere. Copy one of the Packages.tar.gz from before (into one directory) and one from after into the other directory. Might be a good idea to run rebuilddb now to be sure you will have an after snapshot. Unpack the two packages. Then run diff on the two directories to see what was there before and what's there now.

qscomputing · 03-31-2006, 09:54 PM

That directory doesn't exist for me, but I found the list of RPMs I removed in the system log. I can't seem to find my Knoppix disk, but is there any way to run RPM on my system directly from the Mandriva rescue console?

Thanks very much.