DATELINE: Some Folder In /dev/sda1 I.E. Your Root Partition on Your Primary Lappy/Desktop

invariably it happens that we screw up an important library upon which all things seem to depend. today, in my ongoing war against the anthropomorphized gnu/linux’s malpractice lawyers, i emerged from a battle/lawsuit victorious. i want to outline the details in a motd on the grapevine because i couldn’t find sufficient help anywhere – and i even resorted to desperate pleas on mainstream irc – so i’m pretty sure a guide doesn’t exist for this particular battle.

 

in my case, the package that got f’cked was libc6 & glibc which are in one of ubuntu’s weird-ish manners combined into a meta-ish package called eglibc or something. at some point, by no real fault of my own as the user, my system was running two different versions of libc, and this rendered almost every command i could issue useless. the error was as follows:

 GLIBC_2.17′ not found (required by /bin/ls)

not a joke, that was seriously my system’s response to a call of `ls` (although `echo *` continued to work).

my laptop’s manufacturers responded to my support ticket (under paid warranty) with the following:

 

interaction w/my hardware manufacturer’s under-warranty tech-support during major system crisis

after a painstaking process of this & that, i ended up posting the following as my solution:

  1. accept that your system is f’cked. i wasted a lot of time keeping the kernel & in-memory programs running.
  2. boot a functional instance of ubuntu, most likely off of a thumb or cd/dvd image.
  3. do ‘mkdir /m1’ then ‘mount /dev/sda1 /m1’
  4. grab the apropos deb from http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/libc6 — replace “trusty” in that URI with your distribution
  5. save the deb to /m1 and from terminal, cd’d into the /m1 directory, call ‘dpkg -x {libname.deb} /m1’ to extract it
  6. call ‘chroot /m1’ and try ‘ls’ — it should work. feel free to run ‘dpkg -l | grep libc6’ to see details & confirm all upgrades
  7. if this doesn’t boot, get back into the working instance, mount your /dev/sda1, chroot to its folder & call ‘dpkg –configure -a’
  8. avoid #7 and all future handling of package/system configuration on your ubuntu using debian utilities.
  9. browse /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ and see that there are only one instance each of ld-2.xx.so & libc-2.xx.so & libpthread-2.xx.so
  10. while still in the changed root call apt-get and do update purge autopurge autoremove install, the works.
  11. reboot and don’t f’ck with packages using debian tools ever again. if you get out of this without fresh install, you got lucky.

 

i don’t want my motds to be computer science support tutorials but this is a bigger concept than that. i only hope that enough people will know about the grapevine soon enough that this advice will get into the appropriate hands! hey – help us make that happen if you can, would you? cheers.