SuSE 9.1 Pro, Yast shows no packages installed!
 

I've got a really strange situation. I recently did an install of SuSE 9.1 Pro, and when I did so, I went ahead and selected for every package to be installed, since I had the space and didn't want to mess around later.

Everything seems to be fine. However, I noticed today when trying to troubleshoot a minor problem that somethign was very odd. According to Yast, I have no packages installed. At all. When I go to the "zzAll" selection on the list, nothing shows up as checked off. Obviously, since the system is running and I'm typing this, the packages are there. But Yast isn't seeing them.

What's more is, since it's not seeing them, installing ANYTHING through Yast means it wants to install a SLEW of "dependent" packages -- packages which are already installed but it thinks aren't. For example, (re-) installing kaffeine this afternoon required 30 minutes of package loading as Yast selected pretty much every single package that was tangentially connected to kaffeine to reinstall. Afterwards, going into Yast show still nothing is installed, including kaffeine (which of course really is installed).

What can I do to make it go through and correctly determine what is and isn't there? Any idea what could have caused this? I'll do a reinstall if needed, but I'm hoping there's an easy way around this. Google and forum searches didn't turn up a similar problem. Please help!

Follow-up. I found another thread where someone had this problem, but it looks like no one was able to help that person either. I tried doing updatedb as su, but it gave me a bunch of "Permission denied" errors and did not solve the problem.

Searching on Google I found out that Yast stores package info in
/var/lib/YaST2/you/mnt/

which is empty on my machine.

Surely there's SOME way to get Yast to reacquire package info!

Well, some more digging and Googling and mucking about and I seem to have solved the problem! And me, a complete neophyte!

Here's the solution:

As root, head over to /usr/lib/rpm

Create a backup directory somewhere. I made /home/dave/dbbak

Move all of the rpmdb_ files to that directory. For me, this was:
mv rpmdb_* /home/dave/dbbak

Now rebuild the rpm database with this command:

rpm --rebuilddb

It'll take a few minutes, so be patient.

It finished, I went into YaST, and there were my packages.

Hope this helps someone in a similar bind!

Hah! Youre lucky.

/var/lib/rpm contains no rpmdb__ files

Yast shows nothing

And rpm --rebuilddb
CRASHES, yes thats right, HANGS my machine completely.

And all I did was wipe (by accident) that var/opt/yast whatever wherever YaST stores its patches - cuz I have them all completely downloaded, thought I could just put it in there, silly me!

:cry:

HELp!?