Okay, so I committed several major computing faux-pas, and I’ve been justifiably punished by the electron-gods; and, now I’m looking for a path to atonement…
How it happened…
Foolishly, after freshly installing my new 11.3 distro, and having it work like a dream for a few weeks, I did a bad bad thing (several actually):
I wanted to try out a NDS-emulator, and downloaded the source-code and tried to install it using a combination of Yast (which I am a complete neophyte with) and the command-line. It seemed that I didn’t even have a c-compiler or glib installed; so, I went through a long sordid process of typing ./configure and make and scanning the resultant log for failures and then installing those missing packages using Yast, before my / partition was getting over-full from all the new installations (it is only 4.9 GiB and is now 4.7 GiB used) and even after installing the gtk and other extension RPMs I wasn’t able to get the NDS-emulator package to compile… I finally abandoned the project in a huff, and tried to un-install all the packages I had added, using Yast; but, the dependencies were quite complicated, and I was hot-headedly clicking the default options… Not only was the disk-space not cleared on my / partition; but, when next I booted the system, I had NO NETWORK ACCESS and my Firefox browser was uninstalled… O.O Eventually, I figured out that the Network Manager had been uninstalled as well; but, I was unable to re-install them because Yast insists on downloading the latest RPMs from the mother-site, and gives no option to use the installation DVD. I figured out a work-around of that feature, opening the DVD manually, and going into the SUSE directory where all the RPMs are stored and clicking on them, and ignoring the download failure notices… I managed to get Network Manager nominally installed along with Firefox again; but, service is still wonky… Now I’ve been noticing frequent Plasma Desktop crashes, and intermittant network failure, too… I mustn’t have installed all the required RPMs for Network manager or the C compiler or something…?
- No, I didn’t take a root back-up or any backups before this whole mess erupted
- I’ve worked with Linux systems before, but never SuSE, and never with an X-windows system
- I didn’t lose any DATA in the process—thankfully—but it is all backed up now on external media now, anyway.
- The problem principally appears to be isolated to the OS files, and broken dependencies—which I am unfamiliar with tracking manually or otherwise…
Queries…
- Where are the RPMs that Yast downloads automatically, stored?
- Is it feasible to reinstall my OS on top of my existing installation to correct these problems?
- What risks would reinstalling have on the system?
- Are there any other ways of fixing my problems?
- Is there a log anywhere of the actions Yast performs: so that I could identify the packages that were altered or destroyed so that I could selectively reinstall only those packages?
- Any other suggestions? I’d like to preserve my current installation if possible, since it took me weeks to get the sound-system and multi-media web-content to work, etc.