It all started yesterday, innocently enough, when I attempted to upgrade my Red Hat 8.0 system, running perfectly, to Red Hat Pro Workstation v3. I've been an RHN subscriber for years and maybe I didn't realize that I had it so good.
(
After waiting on the phone for 20 minutes for someone, obviously in Bangladesh somewhere ...
... to inform me that no one could be bothered to answer my question, I've stumbled upon this blog. (
Whew! )
(1) At first, the ProWS disk wouldn't even recognize that I
had a previous version of RH installed. I finally found
linux upgradeany and it proceeded to install ...
everything. Three CD-ROMs worth. It didn't even give me a chance to choose.
(2) Upon reboot, I find that I'm still running:
"Linux version 2.4.20-28.8 (bhcompile@daffy.perf.redhat.com) (gcc version 3.2 20020903 (Red Hat Linux 8.0 3.2-7)) #1 Thu Dec 18 12:53:39 EST 2003"
(2a) Looking at the
/boot directory, I see a
vmlinux-2.4.21-4.EL file, and the corresponding
vmlinuz, but no
initrd...img file. Furthermore, attempting to use
/sbin/mkinitrd informs me that there is no
initio module for the release; and so it is: there is not.
Why not?
(2c) I also observe that no entry has been made for this kernel in
grub.conf. So that's why I'm still running an 8.0 kernel. Good thing too I guess because if there's no
initrd I don't think I'd get very far?
But I thought that I'd just spent four hours installing an upgrade!
---
Think we be done yet? Oh,
noooo....
---
(3) What lead me down this primrose path in the first place was the fact that
up2date would not run. It crashed with an "error in pthread"... the exact details of which momentarily escape me. But basically,
nothing worked. After much gnashing and googling I found that by removing
/usr/bin/tls and re-running
/sbin/ldconfig a few zillion times, I could make that go away
although up2date
still will not run in GUI mode, and thinks I'm on version 8.0, which apparently I am.
(3a) Because I can't get a v9.0 kernel running, I can't tell Red Hat Network that I'm wanting to subscribe to the Red Hat 9.0 channels,
to which I have several active, paid-up entitlements! Therefore, even though I must presume that most of these problems have been fixed somewhere, I can't connect to RHN to download and install them.
---
(4) Until I hit upon the
/usr/bin/tls kludge
(3) above) I could not run
mysqld nor
mozilla nor even
(now this is really serious! KPatience solitaire! Ordinary Red Hat tools like the
services contr
(4a) Most if not all of the Red Hat stuff like
redhat-config-services do not run:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/share/redhat-config-services/serviceconf.py", line 35, in ?
import gnome.ui
ImportError: No module named ui
---
(5) Oh yeah,
wine programs are stone-dead too. ("segmentation fault")
===
Eleven hours later, Bangladesh has never called back; I presume they never will. ...
... I have, apparently, a half-dead half-installed system that is quite cut-off from the RH9/Enterprise WS world that I was trying innocently to move to.