I was trying to install a program today that said it required ncurses. I updated ncurses, and still no luck. I was going to try uninstalling and then re-installing ncurses, but my machine is now paralyzed without ncurses. I cant open yum or even ftp from a command line because of various errors. My desktop is pretty bare as all of the icons have either disappeared or been reduced to a generic icon.

The one plus I have going for me is that webmin is still functioning. I tried going to the "install package" section of webmin and I attempted to install ncurses from this link (download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/4/i386/ncurses-5.4-19.fc4.i386.rpm), but webmin tells me that's not a valid RPM file. I'm running FC4.

Can anyone help me re-install ncurses? When that's re-installed, will all of my other programs be back?

EDIT: I see you're running FC4.

Perhaps someone can send you a binary library you can install. I'm running FC2 at work and can maybe build ncurses-5.4 from source and send you a tarball or something.

You might try booting from your FC4 install CD and see if you can install ncurses that way.

Peace...

The CD's are at home, so I'm going to bring them into the office tomorrow. Part of me is nervous to reboot the machine, because I dont know what will happen then, but I realize I need to reboot because the system isn't of much use to me now.

If anyone has any solutions besides installing from the CD, I'm all ears.

Can anyone give me a quick how-to on what to do w/ the CD? I have an identical (working) system at home that I booted with the CD, just so I could look at the screens and have an idea what I'm doing tomorrow.

I booted to the CD, and I'm not sure which option to pick. If I choose to upgrade, is there anything that will be lost? We put php4 on this machine, will it upgrade that to php5?

I booted into rescue mode, but I wasn't sure what to do there either. Any help is much appreciated!

Are you still stuck with this?

Peace...

Here's an update. I booted to the disk and told it to update, and
saw that ncurses was being installed, so that was promising. However,
now when I boot it says that no inittab file was found and it asks me
for a runlevel. I've entered 0-5 and single, and each time it says
that there are no more processes running at this level, doesn't give me a bash prompt, and I have to
reboot the machine. Any suggestions would be most welcome!

While in rescue mode, I saw that I didn't have an etc/inittab file, but I had an inittab.rpmsave, so I copied the .rpmsave to inittab. It booted, but the default was runlevel 5 and prefdm wasn't loading and causing problems. So I changed to runlevel 3 and I get a login screen that says

(none) login:

It seems like I'm close, what do I do to be able to login?

At that login prompt, enter the userid/password you would normally use to login to the system.

If you can get logged in, you can try to manually start X, etc.

Peace...

I've tried that. I enter in anything, and the cursor goes to the next line, thinks for a minute, and then hops back up to the login line and clears what I've entered. Nothing works at this screen. My guess is the (none) has something to do with it, but that's just a guess.

The 'none' means not hostname has been defined. Do you know the root password? If so, reboot and when you get the LILO or Grub boot screen, you can boot into single user mode. At the LILO screen, enter the name of the entry you want to boot and add "single" to the end. If using Grub, there is a way to pass kernel parameters. Add "single" to the list and when the machine is booted, you will be prompted for the root password.

Once logged in, you can see if you old user account is defined, etc.

Peace...