Totally upset

Leigh · 2005-12-31 08:11:09

I started using arch over a year ago and really loved it up until
now. I spent so much time in the past year making it a totally
kick @ss system and now i'm looking at loosing everything over
one stupid glitch. This freaking GLIBC_2.3.4 not found (required
by pacman) If linux is going to make it it's got to have some kind
of way to fix dumb stuff like this. loosing so much work over one
little system upgrade just kills me. The worst part is that I didn't
do anything wrong. I'v searched the web and searched the forums
and can't find any usful info on how to fix this. If i were one of the creators of this library I wouldn't be able to sleep nights knowing
that its going to crash systems. I would be fixing it or at least
telling people to pull it off the shelf. As much as I hat mandrake
or sues compared to arch I have to say that you can at least get
those two systems reinstalled and back to normal easy in a day.
With Arch it would take me forever, even with backed up files.

Forgive me for venting, but it helps to keep the tears away. I'm
so sick about this.

tomk · 2005-12-31 09:39:30

If you want help, more details are needed.

If you don't, enjoy your rant.

iphitus · 2005-12-31 09:53:44

GLIBC is the core libraries.

Practically everything you would use, uses it.

Windows too, and every single operating system has an equivalent, and on all of them, theres the off chance something will go wrong and they'll get messed up. Happened to me on windows, happened to me on mandrake.

And it looks like, from the tiny snippets of negligable information in your post, that yours has been messed up, either through a mistake by you, unfortunate timing of a shut down, or a botched update.

It's not Arch's fault, its not the devs fault. 99 percent of the time, a glibc failure is the users fault.

If you want help, dont rant, ask for it politely. And maybe do a little bit of research so you at least know what glibc is.

iphitus

paranoos · 2005-12-31 10:20:16

heh actually, i recently attempted installing arch on a computer with the 0.6 install cd. the computer was hooked up with dsl and required a pppoe driver, so i could not do an ftp install.

so, i did a quickinstall of the base system, and added rp-pppoe which i had from before. rebooted, and did a system upgrade. of course, it detected a new pacman version and wanted to install that first.

the new pacman version wouldn't run because i still had the old glibc. i think i also tried installing glibc first, and then pacman, but it was the same problem in reverse. the old pacman wouldn't work with the new glibc. i thought pacman.static wouldn't be affected, but it was! i was going to try some other things, and then i realized that i forgot to make a swap partition, so i reinstalled from the beginning. this time i forced it to upgrade pacman and glibc at the same time, and it worked fine after that.

dtw · 2005-12-31 10:30:28

It's not like you need pacman to install a pkg, you can just untar the pk in / - yeah, it's hackish and error prone but it can work enough to get started - aside from that, a live cd can also do the job i think...

JGC · 2005-12-31 10:52:41

Pacman is linked against versioned symbols of the glibc library it seems. This is really bugging users who upgrade from (pre-)0.7: pacman wants to update itself and after that it will update glibc... bingo, unresolved version symbols in the old glibc, pacman requires 2.3.4 or higher

The solution for this thing is simple:
- Use pacman.static to do the glibc upgrade
- Link future versions of pacman against unversioned libraries
- Make the current glibc a versioned dependency of pacman

Currently we're taking "solution" #1, I think in the near future solution #3 will be the easiest to do (ever tried hacking around in your linker and compiler settings? if you think it's easy, solution #2 is for you)

Moo-Crumpus · 2005-12-31 12:06:08

If you install an old version from CD, you should first update glibc and add the fileutils you need for special file systems, if you use any. After that, you can update "the thing" itself.
· pacman -Sy glibc jfsutils
· pacman -Syu
Or use the 0.7.1 pre installation iso image, it is doing well.

kth5 · 2005-12-31 15:01:26

Leigh wrote:

The worst part is that I didn't do anything wrong. I'v searched the web and searched the forums and can't find any usful info on how to fix this.

there is more than just one way you know. arch has several sources for information on arch specific bugs and issues:

* irc://irc.freenode.net/#archlinux
* irc://irc.freenode.net/#arch-bugs
* http://wiki.archlinux.org
* http://bugs.archlinux.org

so i see no reason to bring up the forums as your only option here. besides, if you can't find anything why not ask?

Leigh wrote:

If i were one of the creators of this library I wouldn't be able to sleep nights knowing that its going to crash systems.

i as a maintainer can say that no package goes online withough testing on at least one box. you can't possibly ask for package maintainers to run 3 or more computers just to check if a hardware problem could arise. the plain IBM/x86 architecture doesn't really cut it anymore so almost no vendor really complies with a common standard to 100%, rather than only its own. why that is? it's simply not possible.

from a running system point of view, us maintainers always keep our packages up to date. we go along every single update before we build a package. we check twice what's going on and ask or dig in on our own to fix something, then maybe even file a bug. additionally that's what we expect users to do as well before complaining.

Leigh wrote:

As much as I hat mandrake or sues compared to arch I have to say that you can at least get those two systems reinstalled and back to normal easy in a day. With Arch it would take me forever, even with backed up files.

first of all, arch is not mandrake and does not try to be. we strive to be up to date and stable. that this may not be possible in all cases is only natural, especially for extra. current is hardly ever broken though. if you depend on stability so much, i sugesst to run arch releases. so to speak download the wombat iso image with the current package set included and then run your system of that. then if a new release is made - take noodle for instance - update to only that. you will have to mostly miss out on extra then though.

if that is not going to cut it for you either, there's tons of choices between (comercial) distros you have. i mean there are a lot of usable proven to be (more or less) stable distros out there:

* Ubuntu
* Slackware
* Damn Small Linux
* SuSE 10.0 (and below)
* Mandrake
* Fedora

even then, all of them may not provide what arch can give you: simplicity. do not get me wrong here, all of the mentioned distros are easy to install but hard to maintain as a sysadmin. the package base is good but never try to fiddle too much with configs. sooner or later you will even have to build packages from source and bypass the package management, then somewhen the time will come when you are were you are now: reinstalling your system. if you never upgrade, that's fine then.

(Slackware is ok though, if you know what you're doing)

Leigh wrote:

Forgive me for venting, but it helps to keep the tears away. I'm
so sick about this.

i know how you feel, i have had many issues with arch too. none of them staid for long though. even if, i always took it as my greatest priviledge to be able to keep my system up to date in a flash. if a critical problem arised i always was able to fix it within a couple of minutes. for me arch has brought productivity back to my desktop and my learning curved did not halt like it was on debian for example.

just yesterday - after almost 2 and a half year - i reinstalled my system. not because it was borked, i just thought it got polluted a bit too much with packages. rather than removing them by using pacman on the running system i felt like trying the new installer. it took me about 3 hours to get my system back up and running like it was before. that includes downloading the image, burning it, installing base, installing additional packages, fixing problems on the way and configuration of apache, php, mysql and my kde desktop. so you see, it is possible to get your system back up fast, it's just a matter of what your aproach to things is.

cactus · 2005-12-31 19:40:59

Why does everyone say "If linux is ever going to make it.." when something doesn't work for *them*?

Linux is a kernel. It is pretty safe to say that it already has made it.

If you mean GNU/Linux, the os.. pretty sure that has made it too, in the server room..

if you mean GNU/Linux on the desktop... pretty sure that is damn usable right now. Works well. Lots of people use it. It may not be ready for grandma..but hell. I know a few grannies that use it too..

If you mean.. "I can just click a few buttons and things magically happen for me, frogs turn into princes, money falls out of my ears, and sunshine makes farts smell like cotton candy.." well.. yeah. not quite there on that one.

Besides, like stated above, arch is *bleeding edge*. Sometimes things bleed..and sometimes devs screw up. Help fix the problem, dont become part of it.

/me wanders off back to his corner grumbling.

Gullible Jones · 2005-12-31 19:57:04

Boot into a live CD, download the glibc package, mount your root partition, su to root, unzip the package in the topmost dir where your root partition is mounted. Then reboot into Arch and do 'pacman -Sy glibc'.

Now, have you got any idea how this happened? Did you, for example, use ext2 for your root partition and suffer a power outage? Is it possible that your hard drive is screwing up?

Leigh · 2005-12-31 20:18:28

I'm sorry for the ranting. I was upset. Well I still am. Anyway The
glibc issue is not Archs fault, never the less it is a bug that people
have encountered on alot of distro's. With me it was like what paranoos mentioned. a catch 22. pacman requires newer version
of Glibc but wants to udate itself before Glibc and updating Glibc
first creates the same problem etc... trying to use static causes a
segment fault. I'm not a linux genius. I know enough about the
basics and the most common conf files to make things work and
thats about it. I'm alittle lost after reading the wiki about chrooting
from the cd to try and repair arch. My worst faut is probably that
I try my hardest to figure somthing out on my own before bothering
others. maybe a simple warning message added to the current pkg
build for pacman saying somthing about the verssion of glibc that is
required before proceeding. or somthing like that could spare others from encountering this problem.

Thanks for the info and sorry for being such a pill over this.

Gullible Jones · 2005-12-31 20:54:40

Did you try what I recommended? This isn't a bug, it's probably a missing or corrupted file.

Leigh · 2005-12-31 20:55:20

Gullible Jones wrote:

Now, have you got any idea how this happened?

It was the first update I had done in months and due to
having a old version of pacman. During the update im informed
that there's a newer version of pacman and do I want to update
pacman first? replying "Y" to that question is what happened.
I'm not sure what would have happened if I had replyed "N".
Would pacman have known not to update glibc to the newer
version since it needs the older version or if it would have updated
glibc leaving me with the same problem in reverse.

Gullible Jones · 2005-12-31 20:59:25

That's weird, I don't think there was ever a glibc rollback. GCC in Testing was rolled back from 4.1.0 to 4.0.2, but glibc wasn't rolled back AFAIK... :?

Can someone confirm that a rollback occured?

Also, what sort of machine are you using? As I asked before, is there a chance that your hard drive is dying?

Leigh · 2005-12-31 21:03:25

Gullible Jones wrote:

Did you try what I recommended? This isn't a bug, it's probably a missing or corrupted file.

if I try to unpack the pkg in the upper most dir and because
the pkg contains the same dir's like bin , sbin , usr ..... how will
that effect the extraction? or will I be asked to omit exsisting
files & dirs? I'm alittle confused or worried about what will happen.

or do you mean a bz2 file of glib and not a pkg.tar.qz ? can you be
more specific?

Leigh · 2005-12-31 21:08:33

Gullible Jones wrote:

That's weird, I don't think there was ever a glibc rollback. GCC in Testing was rolled back from 4.1.0 to 4.0.2, but glibc wasn't rolled back AFAIK... :?
Can someone confirm that a rollback occured?
Also, what sort of machine are you using? As I asked before, is there a chance that your hard drive is dying?

I don't know about any rollbacks but after many google searches
I discovered that this was an issue on other distros. Also there's
a few people in the forum that had the exact same issue but
the threads are left unresolved. like this one....

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php? … ight=glibc

Gullible Jones · 2005-12-31 21:16:34

Leigh wrote:

Gullible Jones wrote:
Did you try what I recommended? This isn't a bug, it's probably a missing or corrupted file.
if I try to unpack the pkg in the upper most dir and because
the pkg contains the same dir's like bin , sbin , usr ..... how will
that effect the extraction? or will I be asked to omit exsisting
files & dirs? I'm alittle confused or worried about what will happen.
or do you mean a bz2 file of glib and not a pkg.tar.qz ? can you be
more specific?

I mean this file, the one from the Current repo.

If you extract the file as root, as I said, it should just replace the existing files without any problems.

Leigh · 2005-12-31 21:38:53

[quote="Gullible Jones"

If you extract the file as root, as I said, it should just replace the existing files without any problems.

Gullible Jones · 2005-12-31 22:12:43

What? The current version of pacman works fine with the current glibc. Just install the new one, it shouldn't give you any problems.

And remember, you're not copying anything around. The old glibc files will be removed and IIRC overwritten, as with 'pacman -Sf'.

Leigh · 2006-01-03 15:52:18

I just wanted to say thanks for the help and putting up with my temper
tantrum. What seemed like a simple glibc pacman dependency problem
ended up rendering my system unbootable *sigh* I'm almost sure it
was due to having not done a system upgrade in a long time. Anyway
I am alittle wiser now and since I have two hard drives and only want
one stable system, I installed arch on both and configured both installs
with grub so either install will boot into the other. so now I have a back up
system incase I totally &%@# one up. All I have to do incase one fries
is change my bios boot priorities to boot from the other hard disk to boot
into the back up install. Trying to rack my brains to remember all
the tricks and file editing was painful but I guess it's a good thing being
forced to remember and learning about all the new changes with the
kernel 26 updates.

Arch Linux

#1 2005-12-31 08:11:09

Totally upset

#2 2005-12-31 09:39:30

Re: Totally upset

#3 2005-12-31 09:53:44

Re: Totally upset

#4 2005-12-31 10:20:16

Re: Totally upset

#5 2005-12-31 10:30:28

Re: Totally upset

#6 2005-12-31 10:52:41

Re: Totally upset

#7 2005-12-31 12:06:08

Re: Totally upset

#8 2005-12-31 15:01:26

Re: Totally upset

#9 2005-12-31 19:40:59

Re: Totally upset

#10 2005-12-31 19:57:04

Re: Totally upset

#11 2005-12-31 20:18:28

Re: Totally upset

#12 2005-12-31 20:54:40

Re: Totally upset

#13 2005-12-31 20:55:20

Re: Totally upset

#14 2005-12-31 20:59:25

Re: Totally upset

#15 2005-12-31 21:03:25

Re: Totally upset

#16 2005-12-31 21:08:33

Re: Totally upset

#17 2005-12-31 21:16:34

Re: Totally upset

#18 2005-12-31 21:38:53

Re: Totally upset

#19 2005-12-31 22:12:43

Re: Totally upset

#20 2006-01-03 15:52:18

Re: Totally upset

Board footer