Screwing up my Fedora Core 5
Here’s how I screwed up my Fedora Core 5 today.
Start up the Add/Remove Software program in Gnome. Remove the ALSA modules. Realise that some of the Gnome components have been removed too, because the Gnome menu didn’t have the listing for desktop software anymore. Run the Add/Remove Software again, and saw that the Gnome desktop was no longer installed. Click on it to get it installed, and wait…
The screen saver is going to kick later, but you won’t be able to get in anymore because the login screen was already screwed.
You will try rebooting, but it won’t work. The Gnome’s screwed.
I spent 5 hours trying to rescue my Fedora Core, and in the end, I reinstalled the whole thing.
Some more information that I found out while I was trying to remove the ALSA packages using “yum remove”. It will also go through all the other packages that have a dependency on ALSA, and will prompt you if you want to proceed with the removal of 240 packages. If you indicate “yes”, it will most likely remove a lot of packages and render your system unusable. I didn’t dare to try, so I indicated “no”, and the yum execution terminated without removing the ALSA packages.
I think this is likely to happen to all packages.
Juice Bar 
I wouldn’t use the Add/Remove program in Fedora Core. Stick to yum or apt-get so that the system doesn’t get *confused* with dependencies 😉
Thanks for the advice, H. 🙂 I thought the Add/Remove program would have been reliable, as Ubuntu’s Sypnatic Package Manager didn’t give me problems for a long time.
I wonder if Ubuntu’s SPM would have the same problem if I tried to remove ALSA… It would be nice if someone tried that before. I’ll still a bit apprehensive on trying that out. I’m still a bit sore from the whole experience. 🙂
I did something similar (except with python). I was able to rescue some data with a Knoppix Live cd – although getting the live installation to talk to my hard drive was more difficult than I would have expected. In the end, I wound up emailing some of the important stuff to myself through webmail. I will probably explore knoppix in more depth in the future (after I have knocked off my newbie edge in Fedora). For the meantime I will hold on to my KL cd just in case 🙂
My problem with live installation was to carefully and manually configure the hard disk partitions so that the installation won’t wipe out my data. Here’s where carefully partition planning will save the day. 🙂
I can’t wait for Ubuntu 6.10. I think it’s less painful than Fedora.