Ever since first running yum on the Dreamplug, over a year ago, I have had intermittent problems with yum/rpm ‘hanging’ for no apparent reason.    There were no errors reported, and – for a time – everything just seemed to work OK..

Now I have just attempted to do an install of xfce4 on the system, with approximately 240 packages, and yum/rpm has been hanging after approximately every 40 updates..

I found that just leaving it alone, the updates eventually completed, but then gave db errors:

………..
  yp-tools.armv5tel 0:2.12-11.fc18                                                      
  ypbind.armv5tel 3:1.36-7.fc18                                                         
  yum.noarch 0:3.4.3-51.fc18                                                            
  yum-langpacks.noarch 0:0.3.0-4.fc18                                                   

Complete!
error: rpmdb: BDB0060 PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery
error: db5 error(-30973) from db->close: BDB0087 DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run database recovery
error: rpmdb: BDB0060 PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery
error: db5 error(-30973) from db->close: BDB0087 DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run database recovery
error: rpmdb: BDB0060 PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery
error: db5 error(-30973) from db->close: BDB0087 DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run database recovery
error: rpmdb: BDB1581 File handles still open at environment close
error: rpmdb: BDB1582 Open file handle: /var/lib/rpm/__db.001
error: rpmdb: BDB1582 Open file handle: /var/lib/rpm/__db.002
error: rpmdb: BDB1582 Open file handle: /var/lib/rpm/__db.003

The fix is straightforward enough..   just # rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db*, and then # rpm –rebuilddb should fix it.

If you find – as I did – that all this leaves phantom ‘unfinished’ transactions, and ‘duplicates’, then install yum-utils,
and then: # package-cleanup –cleandupes, and # yum-complete-transaction –cleanup-only

I wonder if there is some ongoing problem with the old Berkeley db and the operating environment on the Dreamplug.?   I haven’t had this problem on other arm systems, the Raspberry Pi and APC (although the APC Fedora distro – and kernel – is such an antique, that very little ever gets updated, any more..)

Robert Gadsdon.   March 18th, 2013.