arch/chakra bork

By basd on May 10, 2009 | In linux

KDE 4.2.2 just upgraded to 4.2.3 in both my OpenSUSE and Arch/Chakra distros.

...

My Arch/Chakra distro promptly borked when I attempted to upgrade via Shaman (gui to pacman). Since the whole set of packages would not upgrade, I tried doing them a few at a time -- and promptly ended up at a console login, unable to start kde.

After trying to solve the problem with pacman, I was resigned to giving up on my arch/chakra experiment. The known is easier to deal with than the unknown, and if I was facing another clean install, I may as well do it with a system I am more familiar with.

Time consuming problems also seemingly defeat the benefit of a "rolling distro" -- which is, precisely, to avoid reinstalls.

I noticed I had two problems, but I did not know what they meant. One was that the dependency info for the QT packages seemed to be missing from /var. The other was an error message that various packages "exists in filesystem."

I have no idea what this means.

I ran pacman -Qu to find out what packages needed updating and proceeded to install them one at a time until I came to a problem.

I'm not certain how long I would have been willing to do this, since there were 300+ packages involved. But, shortly I discovered problems with the QT packages.

I found some "help" in a forum that suggested this:

"pacman -Sf base", which seeming restores/repairs the base packages.

That having worked, I then started installing the packages that remained to be updated with the -Sf option. After "fixing" the QT packages, I decided to have a go at the full update again ("pacman -Syu") and shortly my system was up and running again.

I have no idea why this worked or whether it was a good idea. But, I am now running kde4.2.3 and everything seemingly works okay.