Kick me !!
After about 10 LAMP installs (with both rpm's and src compilies) without success getting anything but a blank screen at http://localhost/ and exhausting myself searching for an answer (see thread)

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=149574

I decided that there had to be SOMETHING in previous installs that was persisting and I tried to delete everything I could related to MySQL, Apache, PHP, Python, and (the mistake) PERL !! very dumb mistake.

So when I boot now, /usr/bin/perl and libperl.so are not found, and I expect that more is missing that's needed. As a result, no X-window environments will open. A search at rpmfind shows libperl.so in perl-base-5.8.1-0.RC4.3mdk.i586.rpm , which is on disk 1 of my Mandrake 9.2 powerpack.

So at present, that box is sitting at the path to that rpm and if I try to install it, bash responds the RPM is already installed. If I try to remove it, I'm told it's not installed.

SO how do I install it? Any ideas? Is there a way to reload Mandrake without destroying my home & usr partitions?

I managed to recover almost completely. Fortunately I have a Suse 9.0 box on hand and checked it's perl files against the Mandrake rpm file listing to see that they were the same. At least the listing was the same, but the Suse version was i386 while the other box loaded i586. I figured I'd go for it.

I burned a CD with some of the files that I'd deleted. I then booted in fail safe and copied them onto the other box. Booted up and into KDE. Rock and roll.

Just to make sure I got all the perl stuff back and right, I downloaded perl-5.8.3 in both src and mdk.rpm. The rpm Drake isn't working from my idiotic deletathon, so I had to install the source compile. The Perl Install guide encourages you not to do that, but I figure Mandrake is standard enough that there was a good chance it would work out.

Ther are at least 2 problems left that I know:

#1 the "Check for new hardware" function failed on boot.

#2 - I still can't run any of the Drake Configuration tools.