Hello,

I was trying to use alien to create an opera slackware packages, when I screwed up my system. I had the opera rpm and I did

It gave me a .tgz file. I did 'installpkg opera*.tgz'. No errors, so I thought it was installed correctly. When I tried 'opera', it said that opera was an unknown command. So I thought, oh well, I'll figure it out some other time and I did 'removepkg opera*' and removed the opera package. Appereantly somewhere during this time I messed up because when I tryed to run another program, it would always say it was an unknown command. I started to get nervous, so I rebooted. After rebooting I tryed to login. After entering my password, it tells me that bash cannot be loaded because /etc/profile cannot be accessed (permission denied). Thus I cannot run any programs (I suspect that opera really was installed before, just I could not run it because that was the point that bash got messed up). Logging in as root works fine.

What do you think happened? How should I procede? I would just delete the account and make another one, but I want to make sure that nothing else is messed up. Is there any way to make sure everything else is fine?

Alien has done strange things to my slack, I made the mistake
of using it only twice ;)

I'd recommend that you become root, and reset the perms
on files and directories that the package created by looking
at the log /var/log/packages/opera*
and using MANIFEST.bz2 on the slackware CD to
restore them. Re-creating the user won't change the
permissions on /etc



Cheers,
Tink

what is alien?

Alien is a program that (attempts) to convert between different Linux package distribution file formats. If you want to use a package from another distribution than the one you have installed on your system, you can use alien to convert it to your preferred package format and install it.

alien website:

http://kitenet.net/programs/alien/

@Tinkster: ok, I'll try that.

Alright! It worked! Thx a bunch!

No worries ;)


Cheers,
Tink