Severe Emerge problem (python?)

dauphin · n00b Joined: 08 Apr 2003 Posts: 13 Location: Scotland

I hope somebody can help me here. I've spent the last few days installing and starting to get to grips with Gentoo. Just as it was starting to get how I wanted it I encountered this problem.

Since the last reboot, various applications won't run (eg: Evolution, Phoenix, Acrobat reader, VNC). I tried emerging and this won't work at all. Any sort of emerge command gives: /usr/bin/env: python2.2: No such file or directory

I tried the portage rescue, which gave a lot of errors.

I am not sure why this happened. I had been playing about with Phoenix (copied my Mozilla profile and bookmarks across from Windows, which seemed to go OK at the time. Also installed a Phoenix add-on to enable it to identify as another browser - again that appeared to work fine.)
Then I rebooted, aand in the course of that I got a message that the root partition had not been checked in 27 starts and a scan was carried out after which apparently minor errors were reported and corrected. The reboot then proceeded OK but maybe the correction process caused the problem.

I don't want to go any further without advice as I fear through lack of knowledge I'll get myself into a deeper hole. Is there a way I can recover from this?? I was really enjoying Gentoo and feeling pretty pleased with myself as a novice for getting as far as I have - but I don't think I could face starting from scratch again.

M.A. · Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2003 1:26 am Post subject:

I'm sure that Phoenix (and the tweaks you have done) isn't the cause of the problem.
Which filesystem are you using? Maybe you have had filesystem corruption and losing of files, but it is strange anyway.
The error emerge shows, says you don't have /usr/bin/env file, what is very strange. Can you do normal "command line life"? I mean, can you execute ls, grep, etc normally?
Do a 'ls /usr/bin'. You should see there files as nohup, which, chroot, id, nice, and of course, env, and many others. Play around and try to find the severity of your problem, maybe you have your sytem broken, maybe it's just a few files incoherency.

dauphin · n00b Joined: 08 Apr 2003 Posts: 13 Location: Scotland

Thanks for the reply.

I'm using ext3.
I can use the command line mostly normally. KDE and all its associated apps also seem fine.
I did ls /usr/bin as suggested and this listed all the files you mentioned - except chroot. If I now try chroot in the command line I get "command not found".
I do have /usr/bin/env. It is 12.2KB in size - I don't know if that's about right, but I guess it has become corrupted to some extent.
I will keep hunting around for a solution, but really I'm out of my depth and would appreciate any further help.

dauphin · n00b Joined: 08 Apr 2003 Posts: 13 Location: Scotland

I have been investigating further and discovered the following

- in /usr/bin there are a number of broken links: lex, python, python2, flex++, psfstriptable and psfaddtable

- in /usr/sbin, there is a broken link for gcc-config

Do these broken links represent missing executables and is there a way of replacing them? No doubt there could be others if I were to browse the entire tree.

I also noticed in another thread a suggestion to untar python from /usr/portage/distfiles. However, although I can browse graphically using Konqueror to python-2.2.2.tgz, if I try to untar it in the command line it says no such file or directory and if I do ls in /usr/portage/distfiles it is not listed. I find this bizarre.

I am hoping that somebody will be able to tell me that these symptoms somehow fit together and can be resolved - or is it just a question of a random loss of data?

dauphin · n00b Joined: 08 Apr 2003 Posts: 13 Location: Scotland

I've made progress in recovering from this situation, but would still appreciate some advice on a few points.

Here's an update first of all:
I copied over from a Mandrake 9.1 installation the python and psf items referred to in my previous post, as well as libpython2.2.so.0.0
That restored my ability to emerge.
I emerged flex, which put back lex and flex ++.
I emerged gcc-config, which I had also found to be missing.

Problems I am left with:

- chroot command still not recognised

- cannot run Acroread despite emerge -c and emerging again. Error message in command line "Cannot find /opt/Acrobat5/Reader/intellinux/bin/acrobat
Acrobat 5.0 not installed for this configuration, "intellinux"

If I try emerging Evolution and Phoenix again, will I lose all my settings, bookmarks, etc, and if so is there a way of doing it so as to avoid this?

M.A. · Posted: Sun Apr 13, 2003 11:02 am Post subject:

broken links: lex, python, python2, flex++, psfstriptable and psfaddtable

That seems you have lost some files. It should be a filesystem corruption. python and python2 must link to python2.2, flex++ must link to flex, and psfstriptable and psfaddtable must link to pdfxtable. It seems you have restored a bit the system, but as long as you are still missing files, maybe you should do "emerge -e system".
It is very strange, because using ext3 is very difficult to have such filesystem corruption. It could maybe be a hardware failure.
If you can restore the system just 'reemerging' a few apps, try to do it.

dauphin · n00b Joined: 08 Apr 2003 Posts: 13 Location: Scotland

I have decided in the end to start over again. There must have been more damage than I was able to trace, because although I succcessfully merged a few apps, most attempts to emerge resulted in errors. Better in the end to cut my losses and start again from a solid base. As you say, I know a little better where I am going now and it should not take quite so long this time.

I do hope this data loss was a one-off. I have not had any problem with that hard drive before, but anyway this time I am using the other drive and as soon as Gentoo is more or less complete I will image the partition.

Thanks, anyway