After installing almost any package, many library symbolic links get deleted. Some are /lib/libpam.so.77 -> libpam.so.0
This gets really annoying, specially that some programs depend on 20 or so librarries and the links to most of them, in /usr/lib are also missing..

any idea how or why?

i using FC3 and it seems that installing with RPM, APT or YUM gives the same result.

Thanks!

can you provde more details about this? i'd be pretty confident that these would have to at least be specific packages... what was it that broke the pam links?

I can post some info, as I'm having a similar problem. Doing apt-get remove or install seems to eat various symlinks. In my case, even the libapt -pkg symlink. FC3, kept up2date using up2date, using Dag's apt repository.

(@athos 8:18pm)% sudo apt-get install foo
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
E: Couldn't find package foo
(@athos 8:19pm)% sudo apt-get remove mplayer
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
mplayer
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 removed and 7 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives.
After unpacking 16.4MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
Committing changes...
Preparing... ########################################### [100%]
/sbin/ldconfig: Cannot lstat /usr/X11R6/lib/libXvMCNVIDIA.so.1.0.6629: Permission denied
/sbin/ldconfig: Cannot lstat /usr/lib/libsyslinux.so.2.11: Permission denied
[snip about 20 libs failing to read]
/sbin/ldconfig: Cannot lstat /usr/lib/tls/libnvidia-tls.so.1.0.6629: Permission denied
/sbin/ldconfig: Cannot lstat /usr/lib/sse2/libfame-0.9.so.1.0.0: Permission denied
Done.
(@athos 8:19pm)% sudo apt-get install foo [/usr/lib]
/usr/bin/apt-get: error while loading shared libraries: libapt-pkg-libc6.3-6.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
(@athos 8:19pm)% sudo ln -s libapt-pkg-libc6.3-6.so.0.1.1 libapt-pkg-libc6.3-6.so.0
(@athos 8:22pm)% sudo apt-get install mplayer
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
mplayer
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 removed and 7 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B/6770kB of archives.
After unpacking 16.4MB of additional disk space will be used.
Committing changes...
Preparing... ########################################### [100%]
1:mplayer ########################################### [100%]
/sbin/ldconfig: Cannot lstat /usr/X11R6/lib/libXvMCNVIDIA.so.1.0.6629: Permission denied
/sbin/ldconfig: Cannot lstat /usr/lib/libsyslinux.so.2.11: Permission denied
[snip]
/sbin/ldconfig: Cannot lstat /usr/lib/tls/libnvidia-tls.so.1.0.6629: Permission denied
/sbin/ldconfig: Cannot lstat /usr/lib/sse2/libfame-0.9.so.1.0.0: Permission denied
Done.
(@athos 8:22pm)% sudo apt-get install foo [/usr/lib]
/usr/bin/apt-get: error while loading shared libraries: libapt-pkg-libc6.3-6.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
(@athos 8:23pm)%

I get these after installing any package. Didn't matter if I use YUM or RPM. Similar errors to MattPie above, but I do not get any Permission Denied errors. Just the library not found.

Update: Permission Denied messages from ldconfig are from selinux. 'setenforce 0' stops them. So what is selinux not happy about?

On the plus side, reinstalling apt seems to have solved my symlink-eating problem for now. Is there's a quick and easy way to verify that all files of all packages exist?