here's the thing: i installed kernel 2.6 on red hat 9 and apart from having to
install module-init-tools everything went right and my linux box seems to be
working perfectly.

except that now i can't install or uninstall rpms. everytime i try to install rpms appears a
message saying:

"rpmdb: unable to join the environment
error: db4 error (11) of dbenv->open: resource temporarily unavailable
error: can't open package index using db3 - resource temporarily unavailable (11)
error: can't open package database in /var/lib/rpm"

someone told me to try the comand "rpm --rebuilddb" but the result was the same.

how do i solve this?

reinstall your rpms package or upgrade.

or try,:

updatedb

then retry installing some rpms.

rpms package? wich package is that?

i have to say that my linux box does not have internet connection... so i suppose that the updatedb is out of the question...

This is a problem with old versions of RPM and the 2.6 kernel. You can fix this by upgrading rpm. A work around for it is to do the following on the command line:

LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.1 rpm -ivh <package name>

You should be able to use this workaround to install a newer version of the Redhat Package Manager (rpm) to solve this problem. It is probably not good to use this workaround on a permanant basis.