Problem Installing Synaptic
 

While I am not new to using Linux/Unix (I have been developing on Solaris for a couple years), I am new to setting up Linux. I just got a new notebook running Windows Vista 64-bit and have created a partition and installed Fedora 10 on it. I was told to use yum to install Synaptic to help me find other packages to install. So I ran "yum install synaptic" and everything installed correctly. When I ran synaptic, it prompted for the root password and I punched it in. Then on the terminal window, it printed this error:

What do I need to do to get this working? I have since used yum to install firefox, thunderbird, and nedit, but I would prefer to use something like synaptic so I don't have to guess at what names yum needs to install a package I need. I got lucky that firefox, thunderbird, and nedit were pretty easy to guess. Thanks for your help in trying to get this working.

My Notebook specs are:
Toshiba Satellite A305-S6916
Intel Core 2 Duo T6400
4 GB Ram
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650 w/ 512 MB
Intel Wireless Wi-Fi Link 5100 a/b/g/n.

well of course, there is

I could use yum search but I want a GUI, thus being why I want synaptic, thus being why I posted my question. Any ideas? Thanks!

I merely suggested that as a solution for searching for packages whilst fixing synaptic.

Incidentally, whilst you get snippy, http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=thus

This bug report/ Patch suggestion (http://marc.info/?l=rpm-devel&m=119316381014958&w=2) may help you spot the problem, it seems to be due to yum being locked due to it being killed in a specific way

Don't know what your issue with using thus was since it means therefore. However a search for whilst produces no results.

Anyways, back to the topic at hand that post unfortunately is very cryptic looking to me since I am new to all this Linux admin stuff. If you can decipher what it means that would be great, but I am clueless to this.

From what I understand, an rpm installation has died somewhere, and now synaptic wont run, it is convinced yum is running somewhere. Have you tried a reboot?

A reboot didn't help. After rebooting I typed synaptic from the terminal window and got the same errors.

Okay, I was wrong with that little theory. But yes, it apparently happens when rpm exists abnormally- essentially you need to find the rpm that errored and remove it.

Check here:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ackage-700016/

So I need to remove an RPM? Which one do I need to remove?

The simple answer is which ever one you were installing when the error first occurred, but I suppose the problem with that is that its hard to remember. If you can't remember, you could either try:

And go with the last on there, or find the cache dir for rpms and empty it. I'm not at a Fedora box, so I can't suggest anything more

I would do that but I never actually ran rpm. All I ran was "yum install synaptic". And then I tried to run synaptic and received that error. Since then I have used yum to install firefox, thunderbird, and nedit. I did run history with the grep, but as I expected, it returned nothing since I never directly called rpm on anything. Any other ideas? Thanks again for all your help!

Ah, sorry- do it with yum then. I didn't spot that until you pointed it out, I meant to put yum.

Last night, Fedora wanted me to download some security updates so I did. It errored out trying to update gdb, which I had yet to install but I turned my notebook on after work today and synaptic works! I don't know how it suddenly decided to work, but it does! Thanks for all your help!