(First off.. I'm going to apologize from the get-go. It's been awhile since I've had to do anything 'serious' with my linux setup. So, I'm rusty and I think I might of screwed something up bad here. LOL)

I'm running arch linux & have crossed posted this on their forums. -Just looking for any help I can get.

It started when I was updating my system (pacman -Syu) and it wasn't cooperating. gegl was giving me strange errors & I saw that it also wanted to update gimp. -I figured there must be some sort of conflict. It uploaded all the files... but, wouldn't install everything because of the error. Just to get a few things installed & narrow down the somewhat long list.. I type 'pacman -S' and began installing several things that way. (i.e. pacman -S bash chromium , etc... etc..) things began to install... but I kept getting this weird error. -Something baout /bin/bash not found nwcurses or something like that. -Then... I couldn't get back into xterminal or anything. It seems like anything that calls bash is giving me grief. I made a bad move and tried restarting my computer. Arch boots up.. I get a couple of processes that fail and then it hangs before it can start up the graphics & I can get into LXDE. I threw in my knoppix disk and that's what I'm using right now. I'm wondering if I reinstalled bash if that'd fix the problem. -Thing is... I'm not even sure how I can run 'pacman -S bash' in my current predicament,

And, Thank you for your time.

I think it would help if you could grab the error messages / logs.
Did you tried to boot in rescue mode?

Thanks for the reply. syslinux doesn't have a 'rescue mod' per se. Just my current kernel & my 'fall back.' neither work. (It might be helpful to get to a spot where I can try & type commands in.. but, not sure how to do that.) -trying to find where systemd dumps it's logs...

Journal files are located under /var/log/journal.

/var/log/journal does contain files... but.. when I open them in leafpad or anything... I get nothing of worth. um...?

Use journalctl --file or --dir from your "rescue" system.

My knoppix disk is old enough that it doesn't have systemd (so... no journalctl --file) the guys over on the arch forums think ncurses is messed up. they tried to get me to chroot from knoppix & when I try to start bash I get the error I was getting before....

/bin/bash: error while loading shared libraries: libncursesw.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

So.. trying to figure that one out now.

Any ideas? LOL

I'll try to simlink the newest lib you have to the one needed.

A bit ugly but usually works.

um... I'm not quite sure how to do that. LOL.

Maybe pick an easier distro e.g Mageia.

cheers.

ln - s /path/to/existing/lib /path/to/missing/lib

Might have to do this as root to be able to...

Not the best way to learn I guess :-D

And would have recommended Slackware, as it avoids systemd (argh I said it!).

@ niglc

I've actually been on arch for a few years now.,. Before that ubuntu studio & before that- slackware. (I started on version 10 of slackware.) It's just that I've had a million things going on this past year or so... Arch has been behaving very well for me for quite some time now & I just haven't had to do anything real technical for awhile now. i.e. -I'm rather rusty guys & trying to figure this out. My apologies. I know how to symlink.. just what to whom was my question.

Here's where I'm at...

I found this-- https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=202577

Long story short, They want me to download a live disk for arch & do pacman off of their to update things because a new version of ncurses came out & bash & the new version of ncurses don't want to upgrade/ play together nicely. I tried to do that... but my old version of knoppix live disk doesn't want to let me take the disk out & burn the arch disk.

I tried a nasty hack I found with a symlink

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libncursesw.so{,.5}

& that didn't do the trick. It'd be nice if I could get systemd to just let me log into the command line... but, I can't figure that one out because systemd is weird. (& it's late. & I'm stupid.)

I liked slackware -but, I just got burnt out messing with things all the time. (I'm lazy. LOL) I went to ubuntu studio because I draw & play music and thought it'd be an easy way to go. --I just got sick of everything going out of date every 6 months and having to do a complete upgrade on my system. So, I went rolling release. Once you got it all setup iy's pretty cool. -Just check the front page of archlinux.org to make sure there's no upgrade surprises once you got everything setup... I'm just not sure why this one was never mentioned. :/

Anyways,-- thanks for all the help.

If you can download the iso file, you can boot from it with grub2. Just have to remember to update it after the modification is done.

My bootloader is syslinux. (though.. there might be a way to do that in syslinux.. I'd have to check.) I got a flash drive & I'm going to try that route. (booting the live disk off the drive.) Though,-- I have to get a few hours sleep. Thanks again for all of your help!