rpm

[friend621]

Here is the deal. I think I really messed up my RH7.1. I wanted to upgrade my kde from 2.1.1 to kde 2.2.1. Because of dependencies I decided to try out Red carpet and also the desktop that came with it. That did not allow me to get back to the KDE so, I reinstalled Redhat without formatting the HD and keeping same partitions. I only selected kde and gnome to install and everything seemed to work out fine. I got back the old version of my KDE and Gnome and things looked pretty ok. But now I am unable to use rpm to install or uninstall any more packages. I get the following error.
rror: cannot get exclusive lock on /var/lib/rpm/Packages
error: cannot open Packages index using db3 - Operation not permitted (1)
error: cannot open Packages database in /var/lib/rpm.

How do I get this fixed.

Also is there any way to get around the dependencies to upgrade kde? Is it better to compile from source or binaries (KDE 2.2)?

Thanks.

[X_console]

I don't use RPM, but I would suggest checking what the permissions on /var/lib/rpm/Packages is.

For your KDE question, consider removing KDE and replacing it with the current version. That should kill off any kde dependencies.

[godot]

you need to go through and check the ownerships of files in /var/lib. i tried keeping an old /var partition with debian one time and could never get it to work.

[friend621]

The direcotries have all read and execute permissions and are owned by root ( I run as root most of the time). The file Packace in the /var/lib/rpm had only read permission, so I changed it to rwx but I still get the same error message.

Removig KDE completely did not help either. I have tried it in the past, though I do not remember what the problem was.

Thanks