Arch Linux

loathsome

Member

Registered: 2008-04-27

Posts: 9

Lost lots of stuff by installing xfce4

Hi,

Just installed xfce4, and lots of stuff disappeared. It happened once, so I reinstalled, tried grabbing xfce4 again, but then it happened again. Lots of commands like ifconfig, dhcpcd, iwconfig, reboot +++ are missing. What the heck is this?

Just did a reboot, and now I can not connect to my network anymore (as ifconfig/dhcpcd is .. gone?)

Thanks a lot.

- edit -

Found out that I can run the commands from /sbin/, so there seem to be some symlink problems or something. Anybody?

Last edited by loathsome (2008-04-27 22:38:50)

mcmillan

Member

Registered: 2006-04-06

Posts: 737

Re: Lost lots of stuff by installing xfce4

Actually it sounds like something weird happened with your path. What's the output of echo $PATH  ?

loathsome

Member

Registered: 2008-04-27

Posts: 9

Re: Lost lots of stuff by installing xfce4

echo $PATH
/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/usr/X11R6/bin:/usr/local/bin:/opt/X11R6/bin

It's a clean Arch setup, with ONLY xorg and xfce4 packages grabbed from pacman. Thanks for your reply

loathsome

Member

Registered: 2008-04-27

Posts: 9

Re: Lost lots of stuff by installing xfce4

Solved this by typing

export PATH="$PATH:/sbin"

but any idea why this happened? And can I prevent it from happening again?

elliott

Member

Registered: 2006-03-07

Posts: 296

Re: Lost lots of stuff by installing xfce4

I think it has something to do with an update, check /etc/ for profile.pacnew, if it exists, rename it to profile.

loathsome

Member

Registered: 2008-04-27

Posts: 9

Re: Lost lots of stuff by installing xfce4

Couldn't find any files named profile.pacnew, but thank you. What kind of update do you mean?

elliott

Member

Registered: 2006-03-07

Posts: 296

Re: Lost lots of stuff by installing xfce4

A system update, as in pacman -Syu.

loathsome

Member

Registered: 2008-04-27

Posts: 9

Re: Lost lots of stuff by installing xfce4

Ah, yeah - I did do a system update. Weird that it broke the PATH var like that, but it's fixed anyway so everything is okay. I'm aware of this now, so if it happens again I know what to do

raroman

Member

From: Sweden

Registered: 2008-01-05

Posts: 29

Re: Lost lots of stuff by installing xfce4

Same symptom here. My PATH becomes something like this:

/usr/gnu/bin:/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:.

Notice the trailing "." That's not a typo, this has happened several times.
When happened to me for the for the first time three months ago, I thought it was due to bad sectors on the harddrive which I found when trying to track the cause of this problem.
Since then, I've gone through three computers and several more harddrives. Until I finally found this post

Yes, it could be fixed by renaming /etc/profile.pacsave to /etc/profile. Thank you elliott
This "bug" has cost me several days of work and I would like to learn from it... Does anyone know why the renaming takes place? Is there anything else that got messed up during the upgrade? (experiences?)

r|r

Last edited by raroman (2008-05-28 20:29:30)

Misfit138

Misfit Emeritus

From: USA

Registered: 2006-11-27

Posts: 4,189

Re: Lost lots of stuff by installing xfce4

This should not happen. On upgrades, pacman will sometimes give you a .pacnew for config file updates to be merged, but it should not overwrite existing configs. Submit a bug report with as much detail as possible. Everyone affected by this should vote and leave comments.

---

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Sauengard

raroman

Member

From: Sweden

Registered: 2008-01-05

Posts: 29

Re: Lost lots of stuff by installing xfce4

Compared to the Arch-community, I'm a noob and hesitant to file a bug report. If I do, I want the error to be repeatable and well documented.
I had a hickup with nvidia drivers before the last instance of my problem. Before that there were other influences as well (broken HD, at least)

I could not reproduce the error when I reinstalled this morning with a new prcedure:
Installed only base packages from Arch Core CD 2007 (don't know exacly which one)

pacman -Sy pacman
pacman -Syu
pacman -S xorg xfce4

What is new this time is that I did a full upgrade on all base packages, something I've never done before.
This did not overwrite my /etc/profile, but I'm sorry I can't be more specific right now. Time is up. Will report back if I find more details.

MONODA

Member

Registered: 2008-02-09

Posts: 256

Re: Lost lots of stuff by installing xfce4

have you tried reinstalling what got uninstalled? EX: pacman -S wireless_tools