man broken in 2.6.9?

dhave · 10-21-2004, 05:17 AM

Is man working for those of you who've upgraded to 2.6.9? It's not for me.

I get:

Code:

Error executing formatting or display command.
System command (cd /usr/man && (echo ".pl 1100i"; /bin/gunzip -c '/usr/man/man1/mc.1.gz'; echo ".\\\""; echo ".pl \n(nlu+10") | /usr/bin/gtbl | /usr/bin/nroff -S -mandoc | /usr/bin/less -is) exited with status 256.

Somebody on alt.os.linux.slackware said to disable udev, but that didn't do the trick for me.

Any ideas?

KMcD · 10-21-2004, 05:24 AM

man is working fine for me. I don't see how you could break it through a kernel compile.

dhave · 10-21-2004, 05:26 AM

Disabling udev did finally bring man back to life, but I had to reboot first.

The way I was told to disable udev was: as root, "chmod -x /etc/rc.d/rc.udev".

Is there a better way? I confess I don't know what udev is, but I hate to lose it just so I can have man working.

dhave · 10-21-2004, 05:30 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by KMcD
man is working fine for me. I don't see how you could break it through a kernel compile.

If I understood correctly, it has to do with a goofed up udev rule. If that's the case, what I'm trying to find out is if udev really has to be disabled, or if the rule can be fixed, or if I can just update udev.

Somebody said a flakey version of udev.rules was circulating on current for a while, but is supposed to be fixed now. Maybe this crept into my setup somehow.

Nobody else has seen this? There are several reports on the Slack NG. I assumed it was connected with the kernel compile, since man worked for me before. One guy reported it after upgrading from 2.4.x to 2.6.9. I went form 2.6.7 to 2.6.9. OTOH, I did do a swaret --upgrade a few days ago, so maybe it happened then rather than when I installed the new kernel.

Cedrik · 10-21-2004, 06:06 AM

When you upgrade, do you locate all .new conf files and upgrade config files from them ?

dhave · 10-21-2004, 06:23 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Cedrik
When you upgrade, do you locate all .new conf files and upgrade config files from them ?

Umm, not intentionally, no. I just let swaret do its thing by using "swaret --upgrade -a". Should I have intervened?

typho · 10-21-2004, 06:51 AM

he means after each upgrade you should search for all the new config files(usually like xxxx.conf.new). They don't like to overwrite old conf files automatically to prevent breaking some vital configs. Sometimes they have important info for new installs though.

drirr · 10-21-2004, 09:35 AM

Just noticed that man is broken for me too after upgrading to 2.6.9 so I tried booting up the "old" 2.6.8.1 kernel and man was working again. I didn't change anything before/after upgrading the kernel so it must be kernel related, if not please correct me, I'm still really new to Linux.

EDIT: Disabling udev as suggested solved the problem in 2.6.9.

dhave · 10-21-2004, 10:50 AM

This is from someone on alt.os.linux.slackware.

You can also open /etc/udev/rules.d/udev.rules and see if you have this line:

Code:

KERNEL="tty[p-za-e][0-9a-f]*", NAME="tty/s%n", SYMLINK="%k"

If so, then the "tty/s%n" is wrong; it should be "pty/s%n".

After you edit the file, you can reenable udev:

"chmod +x /etc/rc.d/rc.udev"

[Somebody might want to check me out on this. I'm a Slack noob and don't want to pretend to know what I'm talking about ...]

oxleyk · 10-21-2004, 02:17 PM

Guess I'll wait until 2.6.9.1

Kent

drirr · 10-21-2004, 02:22 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by clawhead
This is from someone on alt.os.linux.slackware.

You can also open /etc/udev/rules.d/udev.rules and see if you have this line:

Code:

KERNEL="tty[p-za-e][0-9a-f]*", NAME="tty/s%n", SYMLINK="%k"

If so, then the "tty/s%n" is wrong; it should be "pty/s%n".

After you edit the file, you can reenable udev:

"chmod +x /etc/rc.d/rc.udev"

[Somebody might want to check me out on this. I'm a Slack noob and don't want to pretend to know what I'm talking about ...]

Guess it wouldn't hurt to try, after all it can't get any worse then that it stops working at all

dhave · 10-21-2004, 04:53 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by oxleyk
Guess I'll wait until 2.6.9.1

From everything I've read, this particular problem isn't related to the new kernel but rather to a goofed up upgrade of udev. In my case, the problem was easy to fix, and the kernel hasn't give me any trouble at all.

kersten78 · 10-21-2004, 06:43 PM

Thanks, clawhead, your fix worked like a charm. My "less" command also broke after the 2.6.9 upgrade, and your suggestion fixed that as well.

brodieman · 10-22-2004, 02:21 AM

thanks clawhead. the fix you posted was just the ticket. my more, less, cat, man, etc... did not work after the upgrade to 2.6.9.

I also was not able to ssh out to another machine because of an ssh_askpass: exec(/usr/libexec/ssh-askpass): No such file or directory error and it fixed that as well.

tazdevil77 · 10-22-2004, 12:26 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by brodieman
thanks clawhead. the fix you posted was just the ticket. my more, less, cat, man, etc... did not work after the upgrade to 2.6.9.

I also was not able to ssh out to another machine because of an ssh_askpass: exec(/usr/libexec/ssh-askpass): No such file or directory error and it fixed that as well.

@brodieman

look what i've wrote here:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...10#post1249510