hi guys,

I got some serious problems on my Linux machine. I have Suse linux enterprise server running on VMware. I did some Suse online updates (I think some kernel updates were done), and after reboot I got this message:

/bin/bash: error while loading shared libraries: libreadline.so.5: cannot open shared object file: no such file or directory. Kernel panic - not syncing: attempted to kill init.

I have this message, no command line or smth that I could check on the library. Any ideas how to fix this? Anyone please!!! I had important stuff running on this machine...

Thanks in advance

Looks like you installed some of the updates, but apparently not all. Bash is now missing a dependency, and without it things are not going too well.

You will need to somehow mount the file system image and get the correct packages installed to get things working again. You certainly can get things working, it is simply a matter of installing the appropriate packages.

Now...as for how you do that under a VM, I honestly don't know. If it were a real machine you would just boot it up to a live CD and mount the HDD, but I don't know how things work in the VM world. I know you can do that in QEMU, but I don't know about VMWare. Unless you have some way of mounting the virtual HDD normally, in which case you could just work with that.

If you're using VMWare, you should be okay because you are making system snapshots before doing any updates, right? No? Uh oh, lesson learned. That's one big reason for using virtualization is the simple system restore of snapshots. Use them!

Also, I never trust RPM updates (YUM, YaST, RPMDrake, URPMI, etc...). Like you see, I have had bad experiences with RPM's hosing the system.

If you tried what MS3FGX suggested, maybe you can do a base system reinstall, or use the live CD method. In VMWare, just download a Knoppix ISO and use that as the boot device in the same VM as your SuSE. You should then be able to access the hard drive and back up your data to a network drive or external hard drive

1. find a live cd(maybe knoppix), run it ontop of the guess os(suse),
2. mount your suse partition into someplace at knoppix
3. download the suspected package u'd lost into suse partition(assume at /the/place/for/suseroot/home/user1)

4. mount -t proc -o bind /proc /the/place/for/suseroot/proc
5. chroot /the/place/for/suseroot/proc /bin/bash
6. rpm -i /the/place/for/suseroot/home/user1/yourpackage.rpm

ok guys. A full story.
I got from my infrastructure manager a project of installing groundwork monitoring server on Suse virtual machine. All he gave me was access through ssh to virtual machine. That's how I did all the project stuff. For this reason, no snapshots were done...
Now, after all those updates and the crash of the system, I got access to the real Suse image (they shipped it on my machine to fix the problem). So I booted from Suse DVD with a feature called "load installed system". Everything loaded successfully and I got access to the file system. I checked for the library in yast, ant it shows that libreadline.so.5 is installed. I checked it with find and it reported two actual places of readline.so.5: /lib/libreadline.so.5 and /usr/local/groudnwork/lib/libreadline.so.5
I am not sure if I am right, but I guess that my monitoring program changed the location of readline library and made appropriate changes in the system. after I did updates, kernel was restored to the defaults of the suse system, and now during boot up it cant find default location of library because libreadline.so.5 is in /usr/local/groundwork/lib/
What do you think about that guys? can it be true? and what should I do??

I guess I am in a trouble...

use yast to reinstall that library

When I load installed system with suse dvd, and go to yast, it shows that libreadline.so.5 is installed. When I use find, it also shows that the file exists in /lib/. However, when I manually cd to /lib/ directory, I can't find this file. I tried to create symbolic link of /usr/local/groundwork/lib/libreadline.so.5 to /lib/, but I get the same kernel panic thing on boot up...

well...

yast just shows what is in the rpm package database, it does not check if something bad might have happened to the files (deletion, moved....).
So just make it reinstall the library !

I'll give a shot and let you know on monday

I have the same problem, after an update via Yast and a reboot the systems return kernel panic error ( / Bin / bash: error while loading shared libraries: libreadline.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory > Cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory kernel panic - not syncing : > Kernel panic - not syncing: init ... ). I upgrade the system from OpenSuSe 10.1 to 10.3 but again the same problem. I tried also to remove and install again the library as also the kernel but without any difference.