[ale] can't load libdl.so.1

[Chris Ricker]

On Mon, 8 Sep 1997, Lisa Chiang wrote:

> So I thought, fine, I'll just download the rpm versions of libc, but it
> won't install because rpm says it needs ld.so.1.8 or greater and I have
> ld.so.1.7 (whatever comes with RedHat 4.2).  So I download the latest ld.so
> (ld.so-2.0.4-1.i386.rpm) from the gatech mirror.  It also gave me a failed
> depends error message but I forced it  's installation by using
> --nodepends. OOPS!!

I wish people would learn to do an rpm -ip before they blindly install a
package.  You're like the third person this month I've heard of doing this.

ld.so-2.0 and above are for glibc systems.  If you install them on a libc 5
system, you will totally screw it up, as you just discovered.  The
documentation with ld.so-2.0 warns of this; unfortunately RPM users tend not
to see such stuff.

> Anyone have any ideas how to get in and install the original RedHat 4.2
> libdl.so.1 lib?  Maybe if I could just force RPM to install the original
> libdl.so.1 (even though its "older") during the RedHat "upgrade" session I
> might be OK.

libdl.so.1 is part of ld-so.  You need to force RedHat to install an older
ld.so package.  Perhaps if you boot off the boot disk (since you can't log
in, you can't just boot like normal), flip VCs to a prompt, and rpm -Uvh
--force ld.so-1.7.14 or whatever, you can install it that way.  Perhaps if
you boot into single-user run level (at the lilo prompt, put a 1 after your
kernel name; something like "linux 1") you can rpm -Uvh --force from there.
Perhaps if you boot off a boot disk and then just install a recent ld.so
from a tarball, so you won't have RPM complaining about it being an older
version. Perhaps if you just replace the libdl.so.1 with an older
one that isn't expecting glibc that'll work (though that's likely just to
make things worse, as then the rest of ld.so will be even more confused ;-).
I'd try some of the above and see what happens....

later,
chris

--
Chris Ricker                                 gt1355b at prism.gatech.edu